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

  1. “Well, I think in the short term Let's break it down into phases. I think in the short term, Paid acquisition and just paid media dollars are contracted. And we're seeing it already, right? With Meta's advertising revenue, snaps, advertising revenue, right? There's clearly a global contraction happening to paid media budgets. A big part of it is because all of a sudden the definition of efficient acquisition and good payback windows is shifting, right? So if before for a consumer subscription company, you know, 12 month payback was decent. Now it's like you better pay back your paid media in six months or less. That's the sentiment. So, you know, the obvious reaction is like anything that's north of six months or well north of six months, we're cutting that. And so there's that. Then there is just less tolerance for ambiguity and attribution, right? When it's like when the sentiment is like, let's grow at any, you know, grow at all costs. If you can't attribute things perfectly.”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “There's a lot. There's a lot to that. I mean, I don't know how deep you want to go down the paid rabbit hole because it's changing. It's probably the most affected growth bucket in light of the market turbulence, the venture sentiment shifting I've seen paid acquisition strategies at budgets bear the brunt of that fallout. And so the question is, you know, where do you want to go there?”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “What plug? I think one of the most innovative disciplined first principles SEO thinkers, and I have met is Ethan Smith from Graphite, it's not for everyone. It's a pretty high end SEO shop. So I wouldn't send the series A company there. But Ethan also produces a lot of resources. Work and turning it into SAS. So I don't know how far along they are, but you could probably already get into some of their betas and some of the tools that they're offering.”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Hiring them to help with my SEO or not, but I think that audit is usually a very good use of time because they have templates so what they can turn around for five to ten K would take you many, many human hours to try to pull together yourself.”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “A lot more nuanced SEO developments and angles where I think is really where the opportunity really lies to differentiate yourself. And that requires keeping up with the latest algorithm changes. It's very hard to do that unless you are specializing in the art, right? Or the black magic of SEO. And so that's why I think getting an outside resource at least for like an audit is really helpful. Now, whether it's a boutique agency or, you know, a solo consultant, I think that's more circumstantial. But I found like, you know, at least with the companies that I've worked with, if we wanted to quickly vet the SEO opportunity, like I can do it in a very kind of amateur, at an amateur level, register plug things into like similar web and trying to figure out if Docker is there. But you can get these relatively inexpensive audits done from companies that you can then choose.”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I think SEO is pretty specialized skill set. There are some basic principles that always hold, right? Like best content wins, right? And don't do like shady backlinking, right? And make sure that you're on page. SEO is good and your pages are easily crawled. But I feel like everybody knows that and where the winners are determined are between the lines. I don't have a sports analogy? Maybe.”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “There is a lot of users are connecting accounts and you kind of have a sense of scenting patterns and things like that. Clearly there is a unique data. And so it's a question of can you turn it into some kind of valuable organic search experience? I won't go into too much detail in terms of what we're thinking of there, but that's another checkbox. If you can check two of three of those boxes as like a back of the envelope framework, you may be in good shape. And then it's a question of like, how can you lower the cost of experimentation SEO as much as possible? I think as a rule of thumb, like if you can time box it to three months, like what can I do that at the end of three months, I know like, is this likely to work or not?”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “St. Peter, right? So, do you have a programmatic a goal? And then understanding the competitive landscape. Although the other one is do you have a unique data angle? So for instance, a company I work with called Monarch Money, which is in a personal finance management space. Think of it as like a new and improved version of Mint.”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “They have to diversify away from pay, but maybe more on that later. So I think with SEO, it's like the first pillar I would say is, do you have a unique angle? When you take a look at the SEO landscape today, you look at editorial landscape, which is typically like how to searches and who are the players there and what kind of information is being offered. Do you have something unique to contribute to that conversation? Another thing I had to do like an audit checklist, another thing is like, do you have a unique programmatic angle? Like, for instance, like Cambodia did that with templates. Who else is programmatic? CLL, Retit, like obviously all the real estate, right? That's like really.”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “The first state to figure out, I mean, there are a couple of pillars, right? Because obviously we all know that SEO has a different return horizon than, say, paid acquisition, right? It's longer out. It's maybe six months is the earliest you can see results. And even then, it's going to be a small trickle that compounds over time if you're successful, right? Or you may spend three to six months leaning into an SEO strategy and then realize that it's not going to back out typically, at least a company probably is a series B before it starts feeling like it has the luxury of making these kind of medium to long-term investments. But I think that's shifting right now, but that's maybe a topic for later or even for another odd, but a lot of the strategies that I think were reserved for like series B are trickling down to Series A companies because”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Ooh, that's a good one. It's a very timely question because I'm actually in a process of helping a couple of my companies figure out if it's the right time to invest in SEO. So I've been sort of like the forefront of taking like exploratory meetings with agencies and SEO consultants and things like that. I mean, I would say”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, to me, I mean, honestly, I have to find it in, I think, probably a pretty quintessential way, which is for every individual user, the utility that they derive from the product increases the more users there are on the platform. They expanded version of that is, you know, in the case of marketplaces, it may not be the more users broadly speaking, but the more users in the markets that you care about, right? In the case of collaboration tools, it's not the more users in abstract terms. It's the more users within your team, the more users within your company, right? That correlates with your kind of the rise in your utility curve.”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And so you can try to engineer that. But from my experience, it's an uphill battle. So if you have inherent product network effects, that's when I think layering on referral loops and viral loops, right? You think about like what Dropbox has done around file sharing. Like that's an iconic example, then it's really powerful. I think that there is another case where referral and viral loops can work even when there aren't inherent network effects. If you have a really beloved product, beloved brand, there's a company out of Australia that I have opportunity to invest in called Lika. They do like fresh dog food subscriptions. And incredibly beloved brand, a premium product. And so they're able to lean into one referrals, even though there isn't an error product network effect. They're still able to kind of”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “That's how I'm going to grow. Yeah. So, well, yeah. I mean, I mean, look, honestly, the first thing you look for is that is there inherent product network effects? It's something that it's either there or it isn't from inception, from my experience. I think it's very difficult to manufacture, I mean, you know this that even I do. It's very hard to manufacture product network effects if they aren't there from the get-go, right? So like Airbnb from your days, obviously, you know, marketplace, very strong product network effect dynamics. You think of collaboration tools, Airtable, Monday.com, whimsical, whom we both know, very strong inherent product network effects. Contrast that with a company like Grammar. It just wasn't there. It's not an inherently multiplayer task, constructing communication.”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “If the utility increases, the utility of the product increases, the more users are using it. Another archetype I see are companies that can lead into SEO very heavily, especially if there is a long-tailed programmatic angle. Take Canva, for instance, right? Their biggest initial growth loop, and I think this is public knowledge, was their long tail SEO strategy where any kind of design project that you could think of that you would search for designing, it kind of two categories of keywords, make keywords and template keywords, right? So if you're searching for a template of any kind, a wedding invitation, yada, yada, they had incredibly strong SEO and they were just capitalizing on all that long tail traffic. Not every product is going to lend itself to that, but I always look for that early on.”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And so if you have really healthy LTVs, and that usually means that you're attracting a prosumer buyer, so they may be single player, but they're using it for work, right? And so maybe they're expensing it or just the perceived value so much higher that they're willing to bear that 120, 130 a year subscription. If I'm seeing things like that and I'm seeing that you're converting like five plus percent of your free users to a paid subscriber, then there is a big opportunity to play paid, right? And lean into kind of paid growth loops and paid acquisition loops. There is another archetype, which is, you know, if there are network effects, for instance, you don't find it as much with kind of like, you know, single player consumer subscription subscription companies, but obviously social media, consumer companies, there may be a strong referral angle, viral loop.”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I'm not at liberty to speak to those, but we're talking like in the hundreds of dollars, right? Where some other, like most consumer subscription companies that are like five to seven dollars a month, their LTDs typically camp out at like 50 to 60 bucks.”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Great question. I think there are a couple of ways to answer that. My sweet spot is subscription companies. And it's not just consumer, right? I do work with a lot of BDP companies. It's just not most of them, but what they all have in common is they lean into consumerized type of growth loops and growth motions. So they're very kind of self-serving nature or have meaningful self-serve engines. So if I think about subscription companies, I think there are probably a couple of buckets that I see them falling into, right? If you were able to mail your unit economics and you have really strong consumer LTVs, think Graham or Lee, think Canva. The single player LTVs for those companies are very, very high. They're kind of like average S&P LTVs for B2B companies.”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I mean, honestly, probably through Lenny's podcast, that's one. But Honesty LinkedIn is really the only place. I'm pretty low key otherwise.”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I'm so at capacity right now I've also just been very fortunate to always be at capacity. But I think for every four to five companies that I'm working with, think of it as a concentric circles, right? There are another maybe 10 to a dozen companies that were actively exploring if we want to work together in the future. And then there is another concentric circle of maybe 30 plus companies that I'm just friends with. I'll take the plug. I'm always up for meeting Austin Founders working on important problems.”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, so I've played around way of different quantities. So a couple of things. That I advise full time. What I'll say is that mostly Work, which is a personal choice. And so that is a hard constraint that I'm working with. And within that constraint, I also feel like for me to do my best work and the work that I also enjoy the most and find the most fulfilling four to five companies is probably the max. If I try to go beyond that, the overhead that it creates in terms of the cost of context switching just becomes overwhelming. And I feel like I'm not showing up as best as I can with each individual company.”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I mean, first of all, just As those two I mean, um, I look up to both of them. They've gone first. Also, I Kind of considering advising, especially Just being generous with his time But how I suspect Because I've taught it in... I much. But no,”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “It's now been about, I guess. In the last two and a little bit of years, obviously. It's usually I mean Companies like Canva. Airtable him's and hers. There is otter.ai. Who else? Flow help.”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “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, we tried it. It doesn't work. I'm like, 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.”

    2022-09-01 · Lenny's Podcast · How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source