YouSaid · the spoken record

Yuriy Timen

lines on the record: 74
first: 2022-09-01
most recent: 2022-09-01
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

“Dude, this was good. I feel like my nervousness was unfounded. This was super organic. You are just as welcoming as you are outside of the pod. So yeah, thanks for having me.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, I don't have a very strong online presence. I would say LinkedIn is probably the only place where I eat things more recent. So folks can find me there. They can also find me inside of Lenny's newsletter. I do have a good appearance there once in a while and on this How can folks be helpful to me? Honestly, promote the out of Lenny's newsletter and Lenny's fodd. And, you know, if you're building awesome things, come talk to me. I always carve out some amount of time in my life just, you know, for non-commercial things, right? Just to have conversations with founders and spend 30 minutes with them on a phone expecting nothing in return and maybe, you know, save them some time from making some of the mistakes that I've made and help direct them on a more off-path. Kind of about it.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And just kind of paid acquisition at large. Those are two people that I make sure I'm others, of course, but those are two who I make sure I stay in touch with at least on a quarterly basis because any casual catch up just yields so many nuggets”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, if I think about myself two years ago before starting advising, I was just kind of living in my grammarly cave. And I felt like I was probably at the top of my craft, but I didn't have time to pick my head up or maybe not even just Thai, but I didn't know where to start to pick my head up and do something like this. I would say some people that I, I mean, I mentioned Ethan in terms of SEO. SEO and just organic growth loops and content as a growth engine, he is best in class. Who else? Okay, so Mark Fisk, he shows up in the reforge chats a lot. He was leading growth and marketing at credit card for a while. And right now he's an investor, I think, at the HIG Capital, but he is really, really strong thought leader on all things, performance marketing attributes.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very good question. So I would say. First off, I do believe that. Some of the brightest minds. Honestly, in any craft, are people that you never hear? Because, you know, it takes a certain personality, energy. And probably a lot of other circumstances, right, to invest more invest in your personal brand, right? And also, it's very hard to do that while still staying relevant as a practitioner.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was good. It's very light. It's not like a movie that's going to make you think a lot. But it was like just good old entertainment.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's another thing. I've been like since February, right? Like I've watched nothing. Like my Netflix skew just keeps growing because they keep emailing me saying this new season is out. I'm like, oh yeah, I used to like that show. Let me add it to the cube. I mean, recently I had some downtime. The kids were with grandma. So I watched Adam Sandler.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, there's only one other podcast that I listen to right now because I've just been so consumed. Like I listen to a lot of like live streams and read a lot about the conflict, which has taken me up so much of my headspace that's not work related. But I would say that the all-in pod. I feel like it's like a cool way for me to just catch up on everything that's going on through their unique filter. That's probably the”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reading it right now because I've been following the conflict very closely. But for people who haven't followed the conflict or maybe have only followed the Russian, the war kind of in a cursory way, you can put what's happening into historical context remarkably well. So I feel like that book accomplishes two things. Number one, it's like you learn something about not so distant history that maybe you didn't know, which was about Great Britain's and Winston Churchill's kind of courageous response in the face of Hitler's invasion of Europe. But you also can draw so many parallels to what's happening today. And hopefully, hopefully, that helps us understand what's at stake. Not to end on too grandiose of a note.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I read a lot outside of work and business, so I don't know if it's appropriate, but I'll say that if the Frankl's a man's search for meaning is just a remarkable memoir on perseverance. And I think the biggest takeaway is you can't control what's happening around you, but you can control your reaction to it. And then I'd say that book that I read recently, because I was very affected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I'm originally from Ukraine. I believe you are as well. So it hit very close to home. And there have been a lot of references drawn between the president's Zelens His response in the sport and Winston Churchill's response in 1941 when Hitler started marching through Europe. And so I read a book called, I think, the splendid and the vile by Eric Larson.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's something that I think is very wrong to recent device It's like, what are some of the books you've read recently that you've enjoyed? But I would say there are a couple of books that stuck with me over the years. I think on the business side, or like on the business side, productivity side, it's a book called Essentialism. I forget the author's name. I think his last name is McCowan or something. And it's basically the book about. Cutting out the noise and finding a singular focus and doing that really well. It's a book that was a game changer for me at Grammarly being sort of new.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Direct mail, what has happened? They've gotten better with attribution. Because before a lot of them, a lot of those channels were written off as sort of like, look, attribution is just too hard on there. And attribution is so good and reliable on digital. Right, so that gap, that canyon that existed in attribution capabilities of online and offline deterred a lot of people from offline. To date, offline has gotten better. Attribution as a positioning themselves as being able to do attribution, but also online attribution has deteriorated. So all of a sudden, that argument kind of slimmed out a little bit. And I'm seeing offline get a lot more traction. And podcasts especially are actually very, very performant for a lot of brands. Yeah, those are a couple of things that come to mind.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's still so relatively unsaturated with advertisers that your audience is on there. You'd be surprised. Like, you know, I've worked with brands that, you know, their core demo is like 40 plus married, you know, making 200K plus in household annual income. And you wouldn't think that that demo is on TikTok. And it is. That's the point. One point about TikTok. Other channels, I mean, I think out at home is still not getting enough love. Podcasts, okay? Yeah, yeah. Sponsor this one.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So TikTok definitely one thing I'll say about TikTok is I'm seeing it come up more and more as a channel that works well and sometimes even the most efficient channel, most efficient digital channel for some brands. But I think that the thing about TikTok that oftentimes I was surprised about is you often hear, oh, TikTok, that's for the 15 to 2 year olds, right? I'm down with my gents. Gents, right. And oh, my audience is different. So I'm just going to ignore the champ. TikTok has so many users.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's been growing roughly over the same time that we've been increasing our spend. We're scared to break it. So we're just going to keep spending, right? And so our companies that we horror stories about other companies over spending, they sometimes try to invest in attribution too much, believe it or not, where they're trying to get everything perfect and scientifically pure. But what they don't realize is that the payoff may not always be there. And so. Do I fit this into your question of, I think attribution tracking, attribution incrementality is definitely a worthwhile investment arena, but it can both be a good or a bad thing depending on the level. So you got to make sure the level of investment is appropriate for your stage and what you stand to gain for males.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give them focus and clarity and purpose is remarkable. So not always pays off. What doesn't pay off? I mean, I think over reliance on paint, it comes to bite you in the rear end. I think when I think about tracking and attribution, I think it's a question of like the right level of investment at the right stage. Rarely do companies get it right. They usually fall into one of two buckets where they underinvest In attribution, and they are now their budgets are high, they have a broad channel portfolio and they have a hard time figuring out what's working, what isn't, and they just get into this inertia. It's like, well, overall, the company's been growing.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I would say that getting to know your customer always pays off. So it's user interviews and getting to know your market, your customers and your prospects always pays off. Customer research inside surveying, interviewing, panels, incredibly useful. And I found it to be very, especially early stages. The amount of clarity and momentum that it can create inside of a C series A up to Series B company, when you first do some up proper research push. We can galvanize the team.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Earlier stage companies where you still haven't really approached the local maximum and you haven't experimented with a ton of things. I mean, you can two to forex activation rates easily through onboarding. I think later stage companies like maybe Series B and beyond. I think you can still probably get to 20 to 30% lift and activations. It depends on how many low-hang fruit are left to tackle.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're able to guide them and not expose them to the robustness of the product all at once. So the short answer is almost all the time onboarding is a big opportunity.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's a very difficult place to play in, right? It's like, how do you make it simple enough where a non professional can use it, but robust enough where they go and say, oh, yeah, this is as good as if I would have hired a professional, fill in the blank. And that's where onboarding, sorry for the long-winded answer. That's where offboarding is really, really important because there's such a huge difference between landing someone on that initial editor page be it Airtable, Canva, having them, you know, left to their own devices. Forces getting as much for information or as much relevant information up front and then customizing that landing experience for them so that if they're there to do X and we know XYZ about them.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost always. A lot of my work is in that sort of Rosumer space. So the products tend to be more complex, right? Airtable, whimsical, Canva and video, right? There's like, they're very robust products. And so it's very easy to get lost in their editors. And I think where all of those companies are trying to do for their respective verticals and use cases is they're trying to democratize access to Things that previously you have to rely on professionals for, right? Maybe in the case of Air Table, you're engineers, right? In the case of Canva, it is professional graphic designers. In the case of NVIDIA, it's a professional video editor. So when I try to democratize access, but they're also trying to make the products robust enough to be comparable to a professional grade quality.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Landicum site to like a free user at scale earlier stage. You have really strong product market fit with some kind of small audience segment. That conversion can be 40 to 50%. But as you go broader, it will probably asymptote at like 25, 30 percent. What about a conversion from if you're a freemium from like a freemer to a freemium account or a paying account? Think anything under five percent. Is not gonna work long term regardless of how big your top of fun is. Like you may get to some point, but like for you to remain an independent company, continuously growing pre-IPO, like I don't think it's going to happen, it's got to be north of 5% ideally like north of 7%.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's case dependent, but it started case dependent, it's category dependent, right? So it's not that every company is its own case, but it's like we got to know about what buckets we're talking about, right? I will say that let's say if we talk about prosumer. Freemium saps. I could probably say like a healthy website visit to a free user, a free account creation conversion rate. It's probably like that 20 to 35% range.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I say, hey, it's not time for pain. Maybe Carl on a little lip in a fucking quickly test, you know, positioning and things like that, but it's just too soon. But if instead I encounter a company that's really healthy conversion rates, strong LTVs, I do a little bit of competitor research and I can see where the opportunities are, which channels are less saturated than others, then I may say, hey, it's worth a go. And also just seeing the bigger picture of their financial health, how much runway do you have, right? What is your, you know, what is your monthly burden look like?”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can assess a company, like even if I download the industry as well, based on just seeing their funnel performance, their conversion rates, their retention curves, their LTVs, understanding their churn. I can say whether they stand the chance at making paid work as a former strategy, right? So not just a learning mechanism, not just a kind of a feedback engine, but actually a profitable at delivering acquisition channel or strategy. And if I see that they're not there, right, because the funnel doesn't convert well, the users don't retain, the LTDs are too low.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, there are two pieces to paid. I'm oversimplifying, but I think people will hopefully appreciate the oversimplification. Number one, because it actually drives returns at efficient unit economics, whatever that may mean for your company, your business, your industry. The other way to do it is because it's a very quick way to get learnings on messaging and positioning, on designs, on features you're thinking of launching, et cetera. It's hard to get faster learnings at scale. Then, like AP testing headlines, Google search or whatever. I think the problem that I find is when a company can't tell me which camera in. Or where they try to say that they're in both. But really, it's like, okay, you're funneling 100K a month. It's like super inefficient. And they're not even like running experiments to actually get the learnings.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And all of a sudden, SEO starts looking a lot more Lucurtive because it's almost like you took the urgency of like grow at any cost in the next six months. You took that out of the equation. So now it's like we're in a position where we're going to, we don't have to go back to raising 12, you know, 18, 24 months. We have 18 to 24 months worth of runway. And now companies are starting to think more in terms of building more sort of sustainable and defensible growth initiatives.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Default live. And all of a sudden, it's like, okay. Plus, paid is a lot less attractive now. We can't afford to be acquiring users at like LTV to cap one to one, right? Like that's now a no-no. And so SEO is now becoming more attractive because you're like, once you got your burn under control. And you're thinking, okay, we saved all this money by reducing our paid budget. We're cutting it entirely. Like how to put some of those resources.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what happened now, and we'll see where things stabilized because I think we're still in the midst of a little bit of chaos. What's happening now is the same VCs, right, are saying, okay, it's now surviving. You have to extend your runway, minimize burn, you know, high burn aid if you have to. And all of a sudden, growth, whether explicitly or via inference, becomes kind of a secondary objective, especially for all these companies that are far from being cash flow positive, right? They have to figure out how to stay alive but not have to go back to the market and be sort of a victim of shitty terms. And so I feel this is me extrapolating because venture capitalists didn't actually tell me this, but I'm extrapolating that growth is a secondary objective now. It's really focusing on sustainability due to economics, runway control, destiny getting to.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That forces you to focus on very kind of short term tactics, short payoff tactics. And so things that SEO, there was no room for think about that for early stage companies. Because like payoff is going to come maybe in like 12 months in terms of meaningful payoff. We care about getting to the next round and maximizing our valuation between now and then. SEO is for the grown up companies, right? When we're that, we can think about it. And they were getting this reinforcement from everywhere, from peers, from VCs. It's like it's growth, growth, growth, right? The growth at any cost.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me expand on that. In the world that we lived in in the last 18 months, or let's say up until, say, three to five months ago. We were living in a world where funding was abundant and plentiful. Startups were conditioned to think that they can raise twice a year. Valuations were quintupling within a year, right? Like you raise in January and then you raise in like November and your valuation 5x. And so companies were coming off of these like ridiculous series A's of like you know 15 to 25 million dollar A's And they were like, we got to grow as quickly as possible. What can we activate to give us immediate return? And the answer is almost always paid. That's what's going to give you, especially if you're thinking you want to go back to raising less than 12 months later.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put all of your energy? Like, sure, this one tactic is accounting for, say, 80 plus percent of your user acquisition, but your user acquisition is still small, right? So like, don't get distracted with diversification. We'll get there, lean more into this, hit this growth rate, like stand this up, build this into a real strategic advantage, this thing that's working. So I actually have to talk them out of focusing on diversification too early. Contrast that with some later stage companies for whom at scale, I don't know, 50 plus million AR, 90 plus percent reliant on a single acquisition channel, which is just mired with risk, and diversification is the blind spot for them. And then with those, I have to be like, hey, y'all, here's a risk that you're carrying. Let's start carving out bandwidth resources to try to go into explore these other channels and tactics.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep. And one interesting, what I believe is an interesting period. And a lot of it is gut feel, right? And I try to draw companies. Like I encounter sometimes early stage companies when one thing is working well and they're already worried about over-reliance. And they're starting to talk about diversification. And I commend all the times and I see showing up in their OPRs. No, no, too early. Like I'm glad that you're such a former thinker.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the case of Grammarly, it was performance marketing, kind of over-reliance on performance marketing during part of the company's life cycle. And so it was like, okay, this thing is working. It's efficient. So you don't want to stop pouring fire on it, but you're also thinking, you know, months and years ahead, what kind of risk does that open you up to? And so there's a scramble to find. And Gramley has been successful there. With Canva, it was the SEO angle, right? So for them, that was working really well, which is more defensible than paid, right? That sort of like long tail, programmatic SEO angle. But look, you're always susceptible to Google algorithm updates, right? And so how do you de-risk yourself from that? But to your point, yes, and I think that surprising thing to people probably is that it's also the case with some later stage companies. It's not just early stage.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think companies that we know and admire and reference in case studies or in podcasts such as this one from the outside looking in, you oftentimes assume that it's a highly diversified growth engine. I have to say it's often not the case. Definitely the 8 and 20 applies. There's usually some kind of strategy that's working overwhelmingly well. And there is a scramble internally. To minimize reliance on that one thing. And discover slash on the walk, the next step function, the next growth horizon.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know you were right in saying this is probably too hard to answer in this format, but I would break things down maybe into two types. Like there are some channels or tactics where you can objectively figure out like some guardrails for when you know it's showing promise or not because you can pull benchmarks on like good click-through rates and things like that, right? Then there are other tactics where you just have to exercise more judgment outside of benchmark. Yeah.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It just means that because every time you're evaluating, right, the concept of sunk costs, right? So you have these periodic, I think, periods of revaluation where it's like, okay, did we try enough? What is, and this is more art than science, frankly, it's like, what's the incremental lift for us as a team to try to experiment with the next phase of this chain or this tactic? And what is the opportunity cost of that? Right. What are the other high profile things that we could be trying?”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Love the question. It's very thought provoking. I think with some tactics and some channels, you can fairly objectively create some test guardrails where it's like, if it's YouTube, we know kind of like minimum number of impressions that you got to get try two to three creative angles. Here's the click-through rate range that you're looking for. If you get within these ranges on these KPIs Keep going. If you don't, abandon them. I think it's important to also know that abandonment doesn't mean we will never revisit it again.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tried it. It doesn't work. Okay, can I see what you've tried? And then you look at it, you're like, oh, this thing was not designed to even have a shot networking from the get-go. So to answer your question, I think it's focus with some guardrails that you know exactly when it's time to move on to the next thing.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've wasted really valuable time, and now you have so much less time left to find something that does work. Spreading yourself very thin, oftentimes the early stage companies, it's one person who's in charge of all of growth, but they also have some other kind of responsibilities, like maybe ops and customer success, right? If you get them to try like five different things, they may not try them fully any one individually fully enough, right? Because I like to say the only thing that's worse than a channel or a tactic that you tried not working, the only thing that's worse than that is when you didn't give it the appropriate shot, right? And you prematurely or erroneously concluded that it doesn't work. And it's remarkable how often you find that to be the case when I talk to companies. Oh, YouTube.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say focus paired with rapid iterations With limited resources naturally, you have to practice some form of essentialism and ruthless prioritization. But at the same time, the clock is always ticking, right? You have burn, there is a finite number of tries that you have at finding what works, right? What's going to help you unlock the next level of growth, right? Get to the next funding round, right? extend your runway. And so I think either one taking to an extreme focus or trying multiple things is not a good thing, right? And just in case it's not obvious, right? If you focus on one thing and it ends up being the wrong thing.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“how effective your paid media is is through ongoing incrementality testing. So there are two companies that are addressing that or two that I'm excited about. One is measured, can be found at measure.comazing domain name.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe some will find value. Click based attribution, right? Or the digital attribution we were all fawning over cookie-based and click-based, the URL parameter-based attribution, it never demonstrated a causal relationship between our media spend and business results. It was only good for correlative insights, right? And the only way to determine causality is through real controlled experiments, randomized controlled experiments through incrementality testing, which is typically really hard to do cleanly. And also companies have always been often been wary about doing it because you have to like turn off a channel, potentially in a key demo. And you're like, yeah, like the benefit is the learning of whether it's actually incremental, but the cost or the sales that I will lose today. But the only way to really know.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's still, yeah, I think it's useful if you're spending a considerable amount. What's considerable? I say north of 100,000 a month on Bit Media. And if you have some level of channel complexity, so you're not just on a Google or a Facebook, but maybe you're on 3+. Channels, then I think it still makes sense. The other ones in the incrementality space have very different methodologies. Actually, because at the end of the day,”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recast. Yeah. So I've heard really good things. I haven't tried them with any of my companies yet, but there are a couple that are on the horizon, hopefully.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But media mix longing is now making a comeback because there are so many offline channels that are part of folks' channel portfolio today. And then plus a lot of the online channels are becoming less trackable, right? Meta, for instance, right, with the iOS 14 shift. And so media mixed funding, because I come back and the company that's leading the charge of bringing the media mixed modeling methodology of like the traditional advertising era and ushering it into the digital world is a company called the recast.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I mentioned a couple that I've kind of connected with in the last couple of months. So first of all, media mixed modeling is making a comeback, which is something that kind of got popularized in the kind of advertising era of the 50s, pre-digital. And that's how people, that was basically the methodology. I can't speak to the specifics there. The science is a little bit out of depth there. But it was basically a way to use some data to determine budget allocation across channels at the time was probably newspapers and billboards, et cetera. It was leveraging data to some extent. You were doing it maybe on a quarterly basis. And then you would only update it every quarter. There was no way with media mix modeling. There was no way to adjust budget like in quarter because you weren't getting the data feedback loop that frequently.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're going to probably hit, like, come out of that and you'll see paid budgets start making their way back. But even right now during contraction, there are going to be some winners, the companies that have strong cash positions, had strong unit economics, strong payback periods already, right? Graham Reeley Campa, to name two that I know personally, a couple of others, or many others probably. They're going to be winners because all of a sudden, if previously they were competing with companies who were nowhere as efficient as them, but for whatever reason had the green light to keep spending, right? Now all of those are going to pull back their budgets. And so those that have been disciplined have the instrumentation to track things better than average. They're going to benefit from decreased competition on app platforms, decreasing CPMs, et cetera. So they're going to be winners for sure.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But, anyways, yeah. So I think there was a short-term contraction. However, that opens up an opportunity for smart kind of attribution investments. So you're seeing an emergence of some interesting attribution related attribution incrementality related product. A couple that I've personally started exploring and looking into. And then you just see a lot more heads of growth, heads of user acquisition thinking about attribution in building their attribution stacks. And so I think that once we settle into some kind of new normal, which is going to be a combination of Just better attribution stack on average. For companies combined with just the level of acceptance that attribution will never be as good as it maybe once was.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, now it's like, you know, especially with venture backed companies, you have to have two plus years of runway, managed your burn a lot more diligently now. And so whatever you can't attribute sales to like that shit's got to go. I don't know if we can curse on the pod or not. Well, I've been holding back for the last 30 minutes. No, I'm kidding.”
2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source