Jekyll2021-04-16T16:06:48+00:00https://www.thatoneweirdtrick.com/feed.xmlThat One Weird TrickFirsthand experiences from experts in acquiring, retaining, and growing businesses.Max MautnerDevin Mattson, Ethik2021-04-16T00:20:00+00:002021-04-16T00:20:00+00:00https://www.thatoneweirdtrick.com/posts/2021/04/16/devin-mattson<h3 id="what-does-ethik-do">What does Ethik do?</h3>
<p><a href="https://ethikco.com/">Ethik</a> connects Artisan cooperatives worldwide with conscious companies. So much of the value created by artisans is taken up by middlemen. When we looked at the problems that artisans were facing in developing countries they were assuming a lot of entrepreneurial risk. You have to go buy all the raw materials and build the products and then you go out and try to sell it. From a regional perspective, we’ve seen a lot of cooperatives that have stood up and started making really beautiful products and they pay a good wage. They help their artisans be able to financially plan better, but they don’t really have a marketplace for large orders and a lot of them get stuck just selling to an e-commerce brand who repurposes their product and ships it off. What we wanted to do is match them with wholesale buyers or gifters, where they could purchase a larger order up front–it would give the artisan cooperative a longer than normal contract for their work and reduce inventory risk. And for us, what our clients really like about our product is that it allows them to match either the products they offer or their corporate gifting with their stated impact goals. All of the companies we work with and increasingly more companies have specific impact goals that they want to reach.</p>
<h3 id="whats-different-about-marketing-and-selling-ethically-sourced-goods-vs-other-types-of-productsservices">What’s different about marketing and selling ethically-sourced goods vs. other types of products/services?</h3>
<p>It’s more story driven than a lot of other products. Also- we have to be clear that when you’re working with artisans you’re getting handmade products and that doesn’t work the same way it does when you’re working with manufacturers. It needs a longer timeline and a different quality control schedule to make sure that there is consistency in the product and so with that we really have to be early in the planning cycle when marketing. What we do to market that well is keep a lot of samples on hand and we share those with clients early and help them plan six to nine months in advance versus the usual two to three months they’re used to with manufacturers.</p>
<h3 id="are-you-currently-more-focused-on-acquiring-new-customers-or-growing-engagement-of-existing-customers-what-are-you-specifically-focused-on">Are you currently more focused on acquiring new customers or growing engagement of existing customers? What are you specifically focused on?</h3>
<p>We were fortunate to have a few lighthouse customers when we started who ordered a lot with us, but the concern there is that a lot of our revenue is concentrated with them. What we got from that is that we were able to self-fund for the first for the first year, and we could build out new product verticals focused on clients outside of our core lighthouse cluster. What’s good for that one client might not be the most generalizable product though, and the messaging that works for growing those accounts might not be the best approach for getting our overall brand out there and so the way we’re marketing with our existing client base is very different from our how we’re marketing to new clients. For our existing clients we’re helping them with new product development. Getting in early, demonstrating the value of the product, using previous year’s data to how quickly it sells through. That last part is primarily for our wholesale clients. With our new clients we’re still trying to figure out the best messaging. Our current method is finding companies with stated impact goals and then reaching out to them with a proposal of what they could potentially do based on based on what their company’s Foundation or charitable arm is already doing.</p>
<h3 id="how-does-your-work-contribute-to-building-trust-with-customers-in-order-to-persuade-them-to-place-orders-with-ethik">How does your work contribute to building trust with customers, in order to persuade them to place orders with Ethik?</h3>
<p>Great question. Since we’re a marketplace we have two unique sets of customers. We have to provide a seamless experience for artisan groups to get their products onto our platform and find ways to consistently generate orders for them in order to help them grow. We only win if they’re winning and we become a stable source of revenue for them. Also- given that artisan labor is so heavily exploited by middlemen we’ve taken on the mantra (borrowed and tweaked slightly from Atlassian) of “Don’t Screw the Artisan.” To us that means giving steady work to the cooperatives on our platform without becoming unrealistic about timelines for handmade goods. The last thing we want is for artisans to be working around the clock to fulfill an order because we didn’t protect their value enough when we were marketing this to our clients. On the purchaser side of the platform we’re able to succeed if and only if the story and message of handmade artisan goods resonates with them. Part of our mission is to show that companies can have an impact through their purchasing channels, not just their charitable work, so we commission impact analyses on our artisan cooperatives to show that not only are they making great products, but that there is a job creation component that is greater than a simple lump sum charitable contribution. We’re investing in capacity building and skills training with each of our groups. That’s also a message we freely share with our clients to use with their own marketing material because they’re playing a huge part in providing these artisans steady fairtrade employment.</p>
<h3 id="how-does-personalization-give-ethik-a-marketing-edge-in-meeting-customer-needs-give-one-example-of-how-this-is-done-via-outbound-marketing-or-in-product-experience">How does personalization give Ethik a marketing edge in meeting customer needs? Give one example of how this is done via outbound marketing or in-product experience.</h3>
<p>We’re early in the development of the in-product experience but we’ve spent considerable time personalizing our product offering for each client. We do this by matching them with specific artisan groups that match with the client’s stated impact goals. For example, if you’re a CPG company that sources from a certain region in the world, we can help identify artisan groups in the towns where you’re already buying product and so your gifting can align with and further develop that region. If your goal is more specific to a type of impact, female entrepreneurship for example, we can match you to an artisan group that fits those criteria and helps your company tell the story. In outbound marketing this is done through personalizing our outreach. We research before each call so we know the causes a company is working with and how we can specifically augment them. Our in-product experience is in development but will eventually include a self-service channel where our clients can assemble gift baskets based on a specific impact goal.</p>
<h3 id="what-is-your-favorite-marketing-channel-or-platform-and-why-eg-out-of-home-organic-search-email-tv-etc">What is your favorite marketing channel or platform, and why? E.g. out-of-home, organic search, email, TV, etc.</h3>
<p>I come from an Enterprise sales background and so I have some biases I’ve had to overcome. In my past life everything was high-touch/white-glove with our clients, and that’s served us well so far at Ethik but we really need to move past that to reach a broader audience. What we have that’s truly special is the individual artisan stories. I’ve been overwhelmed the past year learning the stories of some of the women we’ve worked with whether they’re making ornaments in Uganda, jewelry in the Navajo Nation, or ceramics in Vietnam- the personal component is just incredible. We need to to get that story out there and the enterprise sales approach isn’t the best way to do that so we’ve hired a content marketer and begun opening up our social media channels to start using some of the content we’ve already generated. You’ll see more from us in the coming months on this.</p>
<h3 id="whats-the-largest-single-marketing-initiative-spend-audience-size-etc-youve-participated-in-and-what-lessons-did-you-learn-from-it">What’s the largest single marketing initiative (spend, audience-size, etc.) you’ve participated in and what lessons did you learn from it?</h3>
<p>I was a Dropbox in the early in the early days working on the first enterprise sales team. The difficulty of selling a consumer product propagated through a company by shadow IT is that when you speak to a decision maker about how wonderful your product is since it’s already been adopted by so many accounts on their domain it almost always turned into a hostage negotiation. CIOs and CISOs would threaten to block us at the firewall or would demand a list of usernames. It wasn’t a very fruitful exercise. This changed when my team began working with a cross functional group from product management, data science, and legal to begin to surface our best accounts. These were accounts where not only were there a lot of users, but there was a strong degree of connectivity between these users through shared folders. We called this “Project Gopher.” Once we surfaced these accounts we reached out to decision makers at these companies and showed visuals of the collaboration going on within their company using Dropbox. We did this using a domain tool that could look up a domain and show a neural network of users, both free and paid, using Dropbox with lines between users that had a shared folder connection. It was tremendously powerful. It eventually evolved to show the amount of external collaboration at the company. This eventually became the basis for all of the enterprise sales pitches at Dropbox and made for much more persuasive and productive meetings with decision makers.</p>
<h3 id="what-accomplishment-are-you-most-proud-of-in-your-career-so-far">What accomplishment are you most proud of in your career so far?</h3>
<p>It’s hard to say but if I had to pick just one example from Ethik I would have to say it’s been my experience with the <a href="https://www.hlhcs.org/en/">Holyland Handcraft Cooperative</a> in Bethlehem. Right after we started Ethik we had a small order of olive wood spoons from Palestine and our client asked us to gather some video and photography to showcase the artisans so my wife and I flew to Palestine in February of 2020 (did not know then that it would be my last time on a plane for a while). We had a lovely time and were immediately embraced by the group there. Our first night in town we were invited to an Orthodox wedding and stayed out til the early morning dancing and singing with our news friends. The next few days we spent learning their operation, from where they source their olive wood, to the individual homes of the artisans who hand carve each piece. Hearing their stories was beautiful and how the tradition of handcraft remained strong in their community. It wasn’t a large order initially for us, but when we returned home we were able to grow the relationship and close several large orders with the cooperative for the holiday season and in the process becoming their largest customer. I’m most happy each time we send them an international wire because I’ve been in the homes where that money is going. It gives me joy each time I think of it.</p>
<h3 id="what-are-you-most-looking-forward-to">What are you most looking forward to?</h3>
<p>I’m incredibly excited about the next year of growth. Our team is just the best. Each person is bringing in a unique skillset and we’re at a really fun stage in our growth. We’ll continue to onboard wholesale clients, but what I’m really excited about in 2021 and beyond is our long-tail offering. We’re building the functionality in the product to order much lower quantities of some of our more popular items and with this we hope to make artisan handcraft available for small and medium sized businesses, not just large enterprises.</p>
<h3 id="related-links">Related Links</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://ethikco.com/">www.ethikco.com</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/devinkylemattson/">https://www.linkedin.com/in/devinkylemattson/</a></li>
</ul>Max MautnerWhat does Ethik do?Jae Oh, LinkedIn2021-04-13T00:20:00+00:002021-04-13T00:20:00+00:00https://www.thatoneweirdtrick.com/posts/2021/04/13/jae-oh<h3 id="what-do-you-do-in-your-own-words">What do you do, in your own words?</h3>
<p>As group product manager, I lead the teams responsible for audiences (ad targeting) and measurement for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. The two product charters are complementary; help brands connect with the right audiences on LinkedIn and then evaluate the success of those marketing efforts against their campaign or business goals.</p>
<h3 id="what-might-be-different-about-marketing-at-linkedin-vs-other-types-of-productsservices">What might be different about marketing at LinkedIn vs. other types of products/services?</h3>
<p>LinkedIn is unique, despite being a social networking platform, compared to the Facebook, Twitter or Snapchats of the world - we focus on professional communities. So when you look at LinkedIn’s vision to “create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce” it comes as no surprise that we’ve gotten quite good at fostering the kind of engagement that comes from offering value to members that support skill-building, job-hunting, hiring, mentorship, or productivity to name a few.</p>
<p>With that kind of engagement between members, businesses and LinkedIn, brands that find success marketing on LinkedIn lean into how they best fit into those conversations members are having with both organic and paid efforts on the platform. While an ad for an AWS developer event might be out of place in your Facebook feed full of food photos or updates from your friend’s staycation, seeing that your coworker liked the event in your LinkedIn feed might get you to attend because it’s more relevant to your professional identity.</p>
<h3 id="on-your-team-are-you-currently-more-focused-on-acquiring-new-customers-or-growing-engagement-of-existing-customers-what-are-you-specifically-focused-on">On your team, are you currently more focused on acquiring new customers or growing engagement of existing customers? What are you specifically focused on?</h3>
<p>I hope this doesn’t sound like a cop-out answer, but we actually focus on investing in both. It’s two segments we have to talk about at the same time because as the owner of horizontal product platforms, our products end up being used by all customers who run any active campaign on LinkedIn.</p>
<p>Thankfully, there’s a lot of room for innovation at the intersection of these groups’ needs on our platform today. Beyond our own roadmap aspirations, all marketers are now facing problems that require really clever solutions. They include changes happening in the digital privacy space by regulators, device manufacturers and app developers that will fundamentally change the way identity and attribution are approached online. There’s also the growing demand from a more well-informed generation of digital consumers for increased transparency, agency and security from the digital communities they spend their time engaging in.</p>
<p>It’s <em>these kinds</em> of problem spaces that I find myself most interested in these days. Particularly in B2B, we’re so well suited to build solutions to not only help businesses survive, but actually thrive given the unique assets LinkedIn and Microsoft has at its disposal. It’s super exciting to think about what we could offer to help businesses and members navigate the changes coming - it’s time we think of identity beyond cookies or demographic attributes, and also look to evolve outcomes or attribution narratives beyond vanity metrics or last click.</p>
<h3 id="how-does-your-work-contribute-to-building-trust-with-users-in-order-to-persuade-them-to-use-linkedins-ads-product">How does your work contribute to building trust with users, in order to persuade them to use LinkedIn’s ads product?</h3>
<p>LinkedIn has been named the most trusted digital social platform several years in a row now and the experience members have with our ads is a critical part of that. Whether it’s the global ads privacy settings we’ve continued to improve or the “why am I seeing this ad” feature that gives more contextual controls in feed to our members, it’s been a core part of how we’ve invested on the member or ‘audience’ side of the business to make sure we provide the agency needed to manage how we use our member data.</p>
<p>On the marketer or ‘customer’ side, we honor #membersfirst principles in our design to ship features that 1) aren’t creepy or potentially discriminatory and 2) use data that we understand the lineage for and can clearly articulate to our members. We’re not in the business of selling our member’s data, so starting with that mindset is a must. Beyond that, the teams are committed to building trust with our customers, with a lot of our roadmaps dedicated to improving both the quality of our existing products but also launching new products and partner integrations to support more independent measurement, audience verification, and attribution. Of course, because trust is consistency over time, I don’t think we’ll ever be done investing in this area.</p>
<h3 id="from-your-perspective-how-does-personalization-give-a-marketing-edge-this-can-be-from-a-previous-employer-but-give-one-concrete-example-of-how-this-is-done-via-outbound-marketing-or-in-product-experience">From your perspective, how does personalization give a marketing edge? This can be from a previous employer, but give one concrete example of how this is done via outbound marketing or in-product experience.</h3>
<p>Personalization is so important to a great user experience in any product, but perhaps most measurable in digital marketing. We all know this because it’s the reason why that second related search you make in the same session on google.com feels so magical and more likely to result in you clicking on a link on the first page of results.</p>
<p>In marketing, personalization as a tactic helps brands move from being ‘yet another option’ to something that becomes or stays top of mind. Whether that is with dynamic ads that show your name and photo next to copy on a job ad that asks if you could picture yourself in this new role, or marketers retargeting you based on prior ad engagement or a website visit with a subsequent ad that is intended to give you more information to consider before deciding on what product to purchase, personalized marketing can do a lot to increase engagement and conversion rates. Retargeting, or remarketing, capabilities are especially important for purchase that take a long time to make as it does with B2B buyer journeys that we see happen on LinkedIn.</p>
<h3 id="what-is-your-favorite-marketing-channel-or-platform-and-why-eg-out-of-home-organic-search-email-tv-etc">What is your favorite marketing channel or platform, and why? E.g. out-of-home, organic search, email, TV, etc.</h3>
<p>Good question. On a personal level, I’m still really impressed with Instagram, but also intrigued by other content consumption platforms like Medium or Quora. There’s something very appealing as a content consumer about experiencing ads that feel both very native to the content on the platform <span style="text-decoration:underline;">and</span> experiential rather than commercial. Also, social media marketing campaigns that leverage charismatic influencers or just great writers/content creators to provide testimonies are more genuine, and not simply popular, is really compelling. Social proof, of course, has such amazing weight in ‘community driven buying’ that I think there’s still a lot to be explored there and very few channels are as well equipped to do it organically as those channels focused on building communities over maximizing scale.</p>
<h3 id="whats-the-largest-single-product-initiative-youve-participated-in-and-what-lessons-did-you-learn-from-it-if-discussing-your-current-employer-is-off-limits-what-about-in-a-previous-role">What’s the largest single product initiative you’ve participated in and what lessons did you learn from it? If discussing your current employer is off-limits, what about in a previous role?</h3>
<p>It might not be the single largest initiative, but bringing interest targeting to our marketing platform was one of my earliest product initiatives I pursued upon joining LinkedIn and one of the most educational. As essentially the first non-profile based targeting capability we were adding to Campaign Manager, it meant we had to figure out how to do a lot of things for the first time.</p>
<p><em>How do we determine what interests to consider and what data should we look at? How do we validate the quality or accuracy of a member’s interest in a certain topic or subject and what kind of controls should we provide to our members? What topics could be considered sensitive or introduce risk for abuse or bias in targeting? How are customers supposed to leverage this to connect with the right audiences? How can we use this data and the investments we make into the platform, ML, AI to understand intent?</em></p>
<p>Answering these questions meant working with several teams to bring the feature to market. Learning what each team did, how they optimized locally for their part, and the value everyone gained from understanding, more deeply, how each of their parts contributed to the whole, proved an invaluable lesson in how to build complex initiatives across many teams. We also learned how data projects like these had potential for unintended bias to be introduced between regions, languages and populations because user behaviors and content classification inherently require context to fully understand. Navigating these challenges and solving for them in time to ship a beta on time reminded me just how much I loved building products that require a deep understanding of a problem to execute it well. Also, that feeling of introducing something net-new to your customers/users isn’t too shabby either.</p>
<h3 id="what-accomplishment-are-you-most-proud-of-in-your-career-so-far">What accomplishment are you most proud of in your career so far?</h3>
<p>To be honest, the kind of answer I would’ve given five years ago looks very different from what it is today. Previously, I would have pointed to a certain product launch, promotion, adoption metric, or award that would have ended with an update to your CV or LinkedIn profile. There’s nothing wrong with that, but reducing whole experiences into a single milestone or byline often feels unsatisfying or insufficient.</p>
<p>In recent years, what I’ve become most proud of is what can happen in the process of building quality products - the development of quality teams. As a product manager, when you finish your project or decide to move on to a new opportunity and your team wants to join you, it’s an amazing feeling. It shows a great deal of trust in you both as a colleague and a leader, tying their livelihood to you and your ability to make an impact together. So, when folks I’ve worked with regularly ask how we can ‘get the gang back together,’ it’s a level of validation even a successful product launch hasn’t been able to provide.</p>
<p>If you’re able to build people up around you in the process of delivering business impact, the returns on investment will be larger and more lasting.</p>
<h3 id="what-are-you-most-looking-forward-to-working-on">What are you most looking forward to working on?</h3>
<p>Surprisingly, it has nothing to do at work. My wife gave birth to our son a few weeks ago and it has been the most humbling experience to date. It’s totally new, offers endless opportunities to learn, and holds amazing potential for ROI, so what’s not to like?</p>
<p>While I’m already seeing so many parallels between parenting and building quality products, I’ll try my best to <span style="text-decoration:underline;">not</span> to set up a kanban board in his nursery. It’s a long term strategy after all.</p>
<h2 id="related-links">Related Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/hellojaesoh/">https://www.linkedin.com/in/hellojaesoh/</a></li>
</ul>Max MautnerWhat do you do, in your own words?Kent Holland, Copper2021-02-07T00:20:00+00:002021-02-07T00:20:00+00:00https://www.thatoneweirdtrick.com/posts/2021/02/07/kent-holland<h3 id="what-do-you-do-in-your-own-words">What do you do, in your own words?</h3>
<p>I’m the VP of Sales at Copper, leading a global team of account executives & account managers. We work with prospective customers that are seeking a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, and with our existing customers as they think about their growth objectives and getting more value from Copper to support their goals.</p>
<h3 id="what-might-be-different-about-selling-copper-vs-other-types-of-productsservices">What might be different about selling Copper vs. other types of products/services?</h3>
<p>Copper is a software solution, so one big difference is that when you’re selling software versus hardware there’s usually an in-depth process to help a customer understand how the software applies to their business, how it can be set up and structured, and how it can be used specific to their business.</p>
<p>Some software solutions are easier to sell, where people understand its purpose more naturally–CRM is different. It’s your digital rolodex. It provides workflow support for your sales and go-to-market teams. It’s your one-stop shop for capturing information about your customer pre- and post-sale.</p>
<p>That means a lot of different people in different roles will use the tool. And everyone wants to have visibility into what’s going on, from the lens of their role or business needs. Selling CRM is a lot more about education, capturing business requirements, and facilitating an in-depth customer evaluation process.</p>
<h3 id="on-your-team-are-you-currently-more-focused-on-acquiring-new-customers-or-growing-engagement-of-existing-customers-what-are-you-specifically-focused-on">On your team, are you currently more focused on acquiring new customers or growing engagement of existing customers? What are you specifically focused on?</h3>
<p>For the last year, it’s been a bit of a transition–when I first started with Copper and took over the sales team, I was primarily focused on new business. We had a product that was earlier on in its maturity. Customers expanding post-sale was primarily driven by their successful adoption and use of the core product. At the time, growing the business was about getting as much in the front door as we could and ensuring customers were served successfully. To the extent that our customers were successfully using the product, our business grew as their teams grew.</p>
<p>More recently, two things have happened that have converged–one is the obvious: Covid-19. That put a lot of pressure on new business acquisition as companies, particularly in the SMB space, tightened their purchasing decisions. We had to make a mental shift to think more proactively about supporting and growing an existing base of ~10,000 customers. That was an interesting transition, and it became very important that we protect and grow the customers that we had by generating as much value for them as we possibly could.</p>
<p>The second thing that happened in the back half of last year, is that we really started to beef up our product stack. We’re getting to the point now where we have multiple packages that present attractive upgrade opportunities for customers and unlock new use cases. For example, Copper was more focused on sales and partnerships use cases in the past that limit the target user base to primarily pre-sale or acquisition roles.</p>
<p>Now, we’ve worked a lot on project management as a capability, on improving our reporting functionality, and on creating a place where this information can actually come together across the entire customer lifecycle. It’s helped us open up beyond users in pre-sale roles and become more attractive to onboarding and customer success teams. We’re building out an account management team that sits within sales, focused on commercial expansion of accounts, and that pairs with our new business account executive team. The two are distinct, and we specialize the two types of rep teams to go after each separately, but we’re increasingly focused on driving value through our existing base.</p>
<h3 id="how-does-your-work-contribute-to-building-trust-with-users-in-order-to-persuade-them-to-use-copper">How does your work contribute to building trust with users, in order to persuade them to use Copper?</h3>
<p>When customers are looking for CRM they’re looking for a tool on which to manage the core of their business. It’s the place where all of your customer data will live. It’s a big decision, and one that folks don’t take lightly, so it’s incumbent upon us as a sales team to build trust as prospects go through their evaluation process.</p>
<p>They’re not only evaluating the tool, but they’re also going through the process of figuring out what their own sales motion should look like. In effect, they’re looking to talk to us not just about how the tool works, but how it works in conjunction with a successful selling process, partnership process, or other motion they want to run on top of the CRM. We work with customers on that every day and leverage that expertise to build trust and add value to our customers.</p>
<p>For us to be effective at building trust with our customers, we have to really understand the way in which these businesses operate. Our sales reps have to become experts in the businesses that we spend time with.</p>
<p>Take real estate as an example – we’re constantly bolstering our understanding of the way that real estate agents think about their client base, the information they want to have about those clients, and the the way in which they want to leverage that information to send newsletters, communicate with their clients, segment their client base, or work through core tasks on a daily basis.</p>
<p>Beyond becoming experts in the sectors that we work with, we put a lot of energy into providing a top-notch customer experience throughout the buying journey and beyond. The attention and time that we commit to our prospects, especially within the SMB and Mid Market segments that we operate, differentiates Copper from the pack. We lean in with our customers to help them understand how Copper works, how it fits within the context of their business, and how it can support them in achieving their objectives. At the end of the day, it’s very difficult to shortcut that trust that a human interaction can build.</p>
<h3 id="from-your-perspective-how-does-personalization-give-a-sales-edge">From your perspective, how does personalization give a sales edge?</h3>
<p>This concept of personalization is the center of a lot of what’s been changing about selling. The amount of choice in the market is unparalleled, and highly effective personalization is the only way that you’re going to stand out.</p>
<p>As a buyer, you have a set of challenges you’re trying to overcome and goals you’re trying to achieve. The sellers that are able to speak to those challenges and goals most effectively are the ones that are going to ultimately succeed in engaging with their target buyers.</p>
<p>In the past, sales was able to be a lot lazier in their approach. You could target a big list of buyers with a series of emails and calls, and expect certain conversion rates that typically held pretty consistently. You could work backwards from your targets and get a pretty good sense of what you needed to do.</p>
<p>In today’s world, you have to have a personal touch and compelling message within the right context for the person you’re speaking to. If you do, you’ll be successful in unlocking conversations that lead to value exchange. If you don’t, someone else will engage that buyer with a better message and solution to their challenges, and you’ll be left in the dust.</p>
<h3 id="whats-your-favorite-channel-or-platform-for-communicating-with-customers-and-why">What’s your favorite channel or platform for communicating with customers, and why?</h3>
<p>I have two:</p>
<ol>
<li>I love engaging with customers through chat within our application. When you can catch customers while they’re using your solution, you have the opportunity to help them move through any of the challenges that they’re going through and learn about their experience in real time. You also are catching them at a moment when they’re likely to be ready to engage with you on the topic at hand. Of course, you have to be careful not to annoy either, but it provides a great opportunity for ad-hoc conversation and often leads to powerful insights or provides an opportunity to progress with a prospect in a way you might not otherwise have been able to. You can learn a ton in that way.</li>
<li>From a sales perspective, I love video calls–you can accomplish so much more with a face-to-face chat, and to the extent that you can look your customers in the eye I think you’re able to build a whole different level of trust. One of the things technology has afforded us is the chance to have the same type of engagement you could have sitting across a boardroom. In the past, you would have had a team flying all around the world to go make that happen. It dramatically changes the game.</li>
</ol>
<p>It’s hard to replicate being able to look someone in the eye, when you can see facial expressions and read body language. Even via phone, which I also like, you can get caught talking about something for 30 seconds or a minute without knowing what’s happening on the other end of the line. With Covid, we’re all Zoom’d out these days, but I still think it’s the best channel to engage through.</p>
<h3 id="whats-the-largest-single-sales-initiative-deal-size-etc-youve-participated-in-and-what-lessons-did-you-learn-from-it-if-discussing-your-current-employer-is-off-limits-what-about-in-a-previous-role">What’s the largest single sales initiative (deal-size, etc.) you’ve participated in and what lessons did you learn from it? If discussing your current employer is off-limits, what about in a previous role?</h3>
<p>It’s ranged a lot across the roles that I’ve had. If I look back before Copper, I spent a lot more time working with Fortune-1000 customers during my time at Box and LinkedIn. Our largest deals went well into the millions. At Copper, our larger deal sizes are in the $20-$25k range, although there are always those larger outliers.</p>
<p>There’s a lot to enjoy about larger deals – it’s incredibly rewarding to close one and have such a large revenue win for the business. With that said, there are also a lot of headaches that come with it. Deals take far longer and are far more complex.</p>
<p>You have to make sure that the entire organization is on board, you’re thinking about all of the other tools that they have in their technology stack, you’re building relationships and champions along the way, you’re supporting pilot efforts to test and probe, you’re working with IT and security teams to ensure the tool lines up from a compliance perspective, and you’re working tirelessly to build value for the solution within the context of the organization’s goals and challenges.</p>
<p>A lot of the same things go into my selling today, but the scale and speed is different. With smaller deals that move more quickly, I’m able to operate at a quicker pace and the feedback cycle is shortened. Both large and small deals can be extremely engaging, but they function incredibly differently.</p>
<h3 id="what-accomplishment-are-you-most-proud-of-in-your-career-so-far">What accomplishment are you most proud of in your career so far?</h3>
<p>This one’s tough, there’s a lot I still want to accomplish. But I think the accomplishment I’m most proud of is from this last year, leading Copper’s Sales organization through the pandemic period. As a company that’s focused on helping small and medium businesses grow, we saw a lot of our customers go through a really really difficult time. Think services businesses like coffee shop Distributors, media agencies, and others. Those businesses had a really tough time operating through this period, and so as a result we had to make some really tough decisions about our team structure and how we approached our work. We had to let some of our team go, which was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. We had to keep our resourcing tight, but also aligned with what we needed to be able to deliver so that we could achieve our plans, uphold our promise to our customers, and keep the business moving in the right direction.</p>
<p>Through 2020, we ended up doing substantially better than we thought we would. On the Sales side, we kept focus and kept our energy high. We didn’t have additional attrition, and continued to help our prospects and customers operate their own businesses through that most difficult stretch.</p>
<p>Through it all, we’ve built a stronger and more successful business. I think it shows the resiliency of the team, and I’m just really proud of being able to say that I helped lead this group through that period. It was a really tough one, to be sure.</p>
<h3 id="what-are-you-most-looking-forward-to-working-on">What are you most looking forward to working on?</h3>
<p>The last year and a half has been all about owning and building out the Account Executive team–focused on new business. I’m now hiring a leader for that team, and will be shifting focus to building out our post-sale Account Management group. It’s an exciting step to build our commercial muscle out even further. We’re also adding a Solutions Engineering team to support us as we serve larger and larger organizations. That team growth, and supporting Copper’s overall growth, is something I’m really looking forward to.</p>
<p>We’ll be answering questions like “At what point do we lean into outbound?” “At what point do we start to focus more on international geographies?” The focus will shift from building out our sales process and ensuring repeatability, to scaling on the foundation that we’ve built. I’m excited about the journey ahead, wherever that takes me.</p>
<h2 id="related-links">Related Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.copper.com">Copper: CRM Software Built For Google & G-Suite</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/kentwholland/">Kent Holland - Vice President of Sales - Copper</a></li>
</ul>Max MautnerWhat do you do, in your own words?David Eckerly, Personal Capital2021-02-03T00:20:00+00:002021-02-03T00:20:00+00:00https://www.thatoneweirdtrick.com/posts/2021/02/03/dave-eckerly<h3 id="what-does-personal-capital-do"><strong>What does Personal Capital do?</strong></h3>
<p>Our company mission is to transform financial lives through technology and people. That boils down to two key offerings:</p>
<p>1). Free online tools available to anyone. These tools can be used to plan for retirement, see how your investments are performing, find hidden fees, or get an overview of your spending and savings trends. This analysis is done across all your financial accounts - which means you have a 360-degree view of your money in a single dashboard. For most people, it’s the first time they’ve ever seen all their accounts in one place.</p>
<p>2). Personalized advice from an advisor. This is a premium service for those who want help with their financial plan or investing strategy. Our advisors see the same consolidated view as our clients, which means we can offer holistic advice based on someone’s overall situation. That’s much different from a traditional advisor who makes recommendations based on just a few broad inputs like age and expected retirement.</p>
<h3 id="what-might-be-different-about-marketing-financial-advisory-services-vs-other-types-of-services"><strong>What might be different about marketing financial advisory services vs. other types of services?</strong></h3>
<p>Consumer investment advice has really split into main factions in the last decade. The first is the group I mentioned before – traditional advisors. These are human advisors who tend to market benefits like personal touch, white glove service, and local presence. The second group is the robo-advisors. They sprung up to combat the deficiencies of the traditional model, namely high fees and accessibility. The robos are cheap, available to anyone with a smartphone, and engineered for extreme ease.</p>
<p>Both models have their place, but they also leave a giant hole in the middle. There’s a huge group of investors who want powerful online tools, real-time advice at any time, and they don’t want to pay too much. However, they also want a real person to talk to about the more complicated aspects of their financial life. Things like estate planning, tax optimization, education saving, and risk management aren’t well handled by algorithms, and aren’t likely to be any time soon.</p>
<p>That’s where we come in – great tools, along with human advisors, at a reasonable cost.</p>
<h3 id="given-that-personal-capital-is-a-freemium-service-is-marketing-more-focused-on-growing-the-free-tier-population-or-converting-users-from-free-tier-to-paid-tier-what-are-you-specifically-focused-on"><strong>Given that Personal Capital is a freemium service, is marketing more focused on growing the free tier population or converting users from free tier to paid tier? What are you specifically focused on?</strong></h3>
<p>There’s no real way to separate those two. It’s a bit like asking, “Is a farmer more concerned with growing crops, or with selling those crops?” If you don’t grow crops, you have nothing to sell. If you don’t sell any crops, you can’t keep your farm running.</p>
<p>We want both. Lots more free users, lots more clients. In many freemium models, the free users are just a cost with no corresponding revenue. For us, the benefits of a free user outweigh those costs. Word-of-mouth referrals, social media mentions, app store reviews, and overall brand expansion are good examples. The marginal cost of letting those people use our platform for free creates more value for us than would a corresponding spend of the same amount on advertising.</p>
<p>It’s also true that we regularly convert users who have been with us for two, three, five, even 10 years. Their financial life was relatively uncomplicated when they first registered for our dashboard, but once they’re a bit older and life has gotten more complex, they need help. So, we’re happy to have people at whatever stage they’re in.</p>
<h3 id="how-does-your-work-contribute-to-building-trust-with-users-in-order-to-persuade-them-to-use-personal-capitals-wealth-tracking-tools"><strong>How does your work contribute to building trust with users, in order to persuade them to use Personal Capital’s wealth tracking tools?</strong></h3>
<p>When you’re talking about financial data online, the first and biggest priority is security. That’s a huge topic on its own and delves more into the technical realm than this audience probably cares for.</p>
<p>But setting that aside, there are two other key considerations. The first is ease. Users don’t want to take time to learn a bunch of complicated software. They’re tech savvy, to be sure, but they’re also busy. If they can’t login and immediately tell what’s going on within the first minute, they’re not going to keep coming back. Second, is what we’re showing them unique? Simply displaying another version of what they already have at Schwab or Fidelity isn’t particularly interesting or useful.</p>
<p>Part of my job is to demonstrate the ease and uniqueness of our tools to our users. Within the product, that means creating an experience that makes these tools easy to access and understand, along with insights they can’t get anywhere else. Outside the product through channels like email or push notifications, it means continually educating users about the tools available to them, as well as offering personalized suggestions about how to improve their financial situation.</p>
<h3 id="how-does-personalization-give-personal-capital-a-marketing-edge-in-meeting-customer-needs-give-one-example-of-how-this-is-done-via-outbound-marketing-or-in-the-product-experience"><strong>How does personalization give Personal Capital a marketing edge in meeting customer needs? Give one example of how this is done via outbound marketing or in the product experience.</strong></h3>
<p>At the risk of stating the obvious, personalization is about making your communications all about the user. And I’m not talking about using a person’s first name, trying to build rapport over where they went to university, or wishing them a happy birthday. Those are all well and good, but it’s not anything a million others aren’t already doing. Much better is a solution to a problem or opportunity they might not even know they have.</p>
<p>A good example is a campaign we recently did around recurring contributions. We know that people who routinely add money to their portfolios in small chunks save more than those who don’t. It’s simply easier to save a little each month than it is to come up with a big sum at the end of the year. So how to encourage people to automate this action?</p>
<p>A standard framing might be something along the lines of, “If you save $500 more each month, you’ll have an extra $250,000 by the time you retire.” That’s not a bad approach, and it’s certainly benefit-oriented, but it’s not terribly personal.</p>
<p>Since we have user data on spending and income, we can take that message one step further. “Did you know that last year your excess monthly cash flow was $1,500 per month? If you invest just $500 of that each month, then you’ll have an extra $250,000 by the time you retire.”</p>
<p>This second version is significantly more powerful because it makes the opportunity tangible. In the first case, the user has to expend mental energy. Is $500 a month a lot? Can I afford that? Most won’t bother. In the second case, we’ve made the path forward less daunting because we’ve framed the full scope of the situation for them. It’s been a big success for us and is one example of how the right personalization, even minor, can go a long way.</p>
<h3 id="what-is-your-favorite-marketing-channel-or-platform-and-why-eg-out-of-home-search-tv-email-etc"><strong>What is your favorite marketing channel or platform, and why? E.g. out-of-home, search, TV, email, etc.</strong></h3>
<p>In-product, no question. We’ve got a great dashboard with a ton of amazing tools. There’s just so much more we can do once a user is logged in versus other channels. Plus, we know that when they’re logged in, they’re thinking about their finances and are in the right mindset to engage on those topics.</p>
<p>Email is another great channel for us, but I’m fully cognizant that when someone is reading one of our emails, they’re probably doing so on a smartphone while in between Zoom calls, caring for a child, feeding the dog, watching Netflix, folding laundry, eating dinner, or standing in line at the pharmacy. It’s usually not the time or place to delve into the more complicated aspects of finance, which is already a tough subject for most people.</p>
<h3 id="whats-the-largest-single-marketing-initiative-spend-audience-size-etc-youve-participated-in-and-what-lessons-did-you-learn-from-it"><strong>What’s the largest single marketing initiative (spend, audience-size, etc.) you’ve participated in and what lessons did you learn from it?</strong></h3>
<p>The biggest I’ve been part of at Personal Capital was our 2019 rebrand. At that point we had been operating for nearly eight years with no significant changes to brand positioning. As a Silicon Valley startup, we had primarily appealed to a specific type of person – younger, tech savvy, early adopter, skeptical of Wall Street, high appetite for data interactivity and detailed analytics.</p>
<p>Early in 2019 we hired a new CMO, and she astutely recognized we were underselling our strengths. As our tools and capabilities had evolved over time, we were no longer just for software engineers and data geeks – we had a compelling offer for a wide range of investors, and it went way beyond a cool dashboard with fun analytics. But when you looked through our website or at our marketing materials, that certainly wasn’t apparent.</p>
<p>Skip ahead to a major pivot in terms of how we represent our brand, and the last two years have been a smashing success. Lead flow, conversion, brand awareness, brand trust, net promoter scores…you name it, it has gone up. The details of that pivot could be their own extended interview, so I’ll save that for another day. But there were two clear lessons that get at your question.</p>
<p>The first is that you need to do a periodic capabilities assessment and compare that to what you’re selling. Businesses change over time. They get better at some things, worse at others. They introduce new services, discontinue others. They open up new markets, and they exit saturated ones. If your positioning doesn’t evolve with those changes, you end up with a mismatch between what you do, what you’re selling, and who you’re selling to.</p>
<p>The second lesson, unsurprisingly, is that these changes are difficult. I have tremendous admiration for our CMO for pulling our organization, almost single-handedly, into the present through her efforts. When you have a successful business, it’s hard to snap people out of the “this is how we’ve always done things” mindset. It takes a lot of meetings, a lot of persuasion, a lot of data, and a lot of negotiation. And even then you’re not sure it’s going to work, so it takes nerves of steel to see it through. She did all those things and proved that if you have the right vision, and you can get people there, the upside is huge.</p>
<h3 id="what-accomplishment-are-you-most-proud-of-in-your-career-so-far"><strong>What accomplishment are you most proud of in your career so far?</strong></h3>
<p>I’ve never had an easy time with this question. There is the standard “job interview” way to do it – here was this campaign, here was the KPI, here’s what we did, here were the results. And I have a lot of those examples over my career, but are those really my proudest moments? Not really.</p>
<p>As a person now more than halfway through his working career, I’m most proud of having spent the last two decades working at companies striving to upend financial services for the benefit of the individual investor. There are a lot of honest, intelligent, hardworking people in the advisory space. There are also a lot of snakes who are out to rip people off and enrich themselves. For someone who doesn’t know much about investing – which is most people – it’s hard to tell the difference between the two.</p>
<p>What’s gratifying for me is the clear difference between where the industry was when I started, and where it is now. My last company was a small speck when I got there. They’re now managing more than $100 billion and arguably the largest independent RIA in the country. Personal Capital has quadrupled assets under management since I’ve been here, and we now have brand trust measures that are as high or higher than major industry players. In the coming decade, I believe the strength of our model will force others to follow our lead, and that can’t be anything other than good for investors everywhere.</p>
<p>Am I responsible for those accomplishments? Surely not. But I am beyond proud to have been involved in even a small way, and when my career is over, those will be the things I remember.</p>
<h2 id="related-links">Related Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/davideckerly/">David Eckerly, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Personal Capital (LinkedIn)</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.personalcapital.com/blog/author/david-ecklery/">David Eckerly, Author at Personal Capital</a></li>
<li><a href="https://riabiz.com/a/2020/7/1/ipo-dreams-die-but-personal-capital-gets-1-billion-price-tag-from-life-insurance-giants-401k-unit-that-includes-a-de-facto-discount-from-early-bird-vc-dollars">Personal Capital gets $1 billion price tag from life insurance giant’s 401(k) unit that includes a de facto discount from early-bird VC dollars</a></li>
</ul>Max MautnerWhat does Personal Capital do?Kyu Shim, Reddit2021-01-29T10:20:00+00:002021-01-29T10:20:00+00:00https://www.thatoneweirdtrick.com/posts/2021/01/29/kyu-shim<h3 id="what-does-reddit-do-in-your-own-words">What does Reddit do, in your own words?</h3>
<p>Reddit’s mission is to provide community and belonging. You may know these communities as “subreddits,” where people engage with each other around user-generated content.</p>
<h3 id="what-might-be-different-about-marketing-on-reddit">What might be different about marketing on Reddit?</h3>
<p>Reddit is an anonymous platform. When you think about other social networks, the focus is typically on the individual; users willingly upload and share information about themselves. Reddit’s emphasis is on the community. The most successful marketers tend to have a pulse on the community’s mindset and tailor their messaging accordingly. Another factor to consider – we’ve seen that Reddit users are often incremental users from a marketer’s POV (i.e. many Reddit users are not found on other social networks), so we encourage marketers to strategize with us in executing a campaign that will resonate with their targeted audience.</p>
<h3 id="on-your-team-are-you-more-focused-on-acquiring-new-customerswhether-that-be-reddit-users-or-advertising-partnersor-growing-engagement-of-existing-ones">On your team, are you more focused on acquiring new customers–whether that be Reddit users or advertising partners–or growing engagement of existing ones?</h3>
<p>Both. My focus area is Direct Response advertisers – these are marketers who are primarily interested in measurable outcomes (e.g. CPA, conversion rate). We are constantly looking to improve the efficiency of their campaigns (thus growing their engagement) through enhancements to our measurement and targeting capabilities. Naturally, these improvements to performance will also attract new DR advertisers to our platform. Reddit is a relatively new channel for marketers – we are seeing a shift from Reddit being an “experimental” buy to something that is more “core” to their marketing strategies.</p>
<h3 id="from-your-perspective-how-does-personalization-give-a-marketing-edge-this-can-be-from-a-previous-employer-but-give-one-concrete-example-of-how-this-is-done-via-outbound-marketing-or-in-product-experience">From your perspective, how does personalization give a marketing edge? This can be from a previous employer, but give one concrete example of how this is done via outbound marketing or in-product experience.</h3>
<p>From my POV, personalization gives an edge for two reasons: (i) it typically provides a better experience for the user, and (ii) it is more performant for the advertiser. It is worth mentioning that I use the word “typically” here. We have seen cases in tech where user data is not handled ethically, hence the rise of privacy-focused legislation like GDPR and CCPA.</p>
<p>As an example, many social networks with a wealth of behavioral data on individuals are able to deliver a better advertising experience than one where that data is lacking. This is backed up by the allocation of marketing spend. In 2017, the overall growth of the digital ads market was ~20% year-over-year, with 99% of that growth going to the duopoly of Facebook and Google.</p>
<h3 id="whats-the-largest-single-marketing-initiative-spend-audience-size-etc-youve-participated-in-and-what-lessons-did-you-learn-from-it-if-discussing-your-current-employer-is-off-limits-what-about-in-a-previous-role">What’s the largest single marketing initiative (spend, audience-size, etc.) you’ve participated in and what lessons did you learn from it? If discussing your current employer is off-limits, what about in a previous role?</h3>
<p>I used to work at a start-up that was integrated with FBX – Facebook’s Ad Exchange (now defunct). One of the largest initiatives we did was around dynamic creative, specifically for travel clients. We were one of the first partners to build the capability to ingest a “product feed” from large marketing agencies, and then dynamically insert / swap out elements of the creative based on parameters from the user’s query, in real-time. For example, if a user were to visit an agency website and enter a query with certain parameters (date, price, etc.) we’d be able to retarget that user on Facebook with the exact parameters of their query, and our bidding algorithm would bid more or less aggressively depending on how far out they were from that travel date. This capability is fairly common now, but for 2015 it was quite exciting and a key differentiator for our company.</p>
<h3 id="what-accomplishment-are-you-most-proud-of-in-your-career-so-far">What accomplishment are you most proud of in your career so far?</h3>
<p>The thing I’m most proud of has nothing to do with any type of product, but a realization I had when I became a product manager maybe in year two.</p>
<p>When I first started PM-ing, I remember thinking it would satisfy my desire to sit at the center of the business, technical, and user context. In other words, nothing but good things. I enjoy thinking about product strategy and business objectives, digging into technical details, and spending time with customers. But something unexpected happened – I started to feel pressure to be the one to come up with great ideas, as if it was my responsibility alone. I spent a good amount of time second-guessing my ideas and opinions.</p>
<p>What I gradually realized was that good ideas can come from anywhere within the company. It can come from Sales, BD, Execs, Engineers, Designers, Users, Interns, you name it. For me, it was really about letting go of my ego, and finding what the right answer is for the business. It doesn’t mean you have to be right, it just means that there is a right / optimal answer, and your job is to find it while being intellectually honest with yourself and others.</p>
<h3 id="what-are-you-most-looking-forward-to-working-on">What are you most looking forward to working on?</h3>
<p>I’m looking forward to working on projects that involve the transition of a simple heuristic-based model to one that is powered by machine-learning. The idea of bootstrapping a product with simple rules as a proof-of-concept, then growing it to something that is more complex and intelligent is really interesting to me. There will be a ton I can learn from that.</p>
<h2 id="related-links">Related Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyu-shim-b32886b8/">Kyu Shim - Senior Product Manager at Reddit, Inc. (LinkedIn)</a></li>
</ul>Max MautnerWhat does Reddit do, in your own words?Liviu Tudor2021-01-28T10:20:00+00:002021-01-28T10:20:00+00:00https://www.thatoneweirdtrick.com/posts/2021/01/28/liviu-tudor<h3 id="what-do-you-do-professionally-in-your-own-words">What do you do professionally, in your own words?</h3>
<p>Throughout my career I’ve answered this question in various ways, but the answer came to me when I joined MachineZone as Director of Marketing Engineering. I inherited a strong team and I had to supplement it with extra talent. My boss at the time was the VP Marketing and I had arranged for the last step of each interview process to be a free form discussion with the candidate and myself (representing the engineering org) as well as him (who could speak for all of our colleagues in marketing). During one of the first such sessions together with a candidate, the candidate turned to me and asked my move from Netflix to MZ: <em>“Why did you make that move? Arguably Netflix is a better known brand than MZ, Netflix operates in the movie space (the candidate words not mine!) while MZ is a gaming studio. So what made you make the move?”.</em></p>
<p>I went on to explain this: “You see, when I was at Netflix my job was to develop solutions that help people discover content. When you look at a gaming company like MZ, it’s the same goal. We present content via games, where the content is in-game items & functionality. So really the scope of my job hasn’t really changed, and moving to MZ allowed me to start exploring a field that I admired before from the sideline (gaming) but never had a chance to get involved in.” As I gave that answer I realized that that is what I do at a very high level: <span style="text-decoration:underline;">I help people discover content</span>.</p>
<h3 id="what-is-different-about-the-products-you-have-marketed-vs-other-types-of-productsservices">What is different about the products you have marketed vs. other types of products/services?</h3>
<p>It’s interesting, thinking about it, I’ve never been involved in marketing physical products – my involvement has always been in the digital space. There is probably a good reason for that: we live in a digital world, everything around us is digital, it’s all on my laptop or the services in my laptop can connect to digital products.</p>
<p>And for these sorts of products it’s much easier to get how users react and interact with your digital product. At MachineZone, for example, we had a lot of data about how people played games. It made it easy to identify the friction points of playing the games. What are the things that they love so much you see the same pattern over and over? You realize this is a kind of “hook” in the game. I think these discoveries are very easy to achieve when you’re dealing with a digital offering.</p>
<p>I’m staring at a printer made by HP here in my home office–I’m still getting emails from HP going like “oh do you want to rate this product? Do you want to do this?” When you unpack the printer you get a whole thing about registering your product online–who does this registration? What does it give me? It’s often a very long registration process and they ask you a lot of questions. They’re trying to figure out how you are using their product: what are the things you like and you don’t dislike,or how you use it? That’s a very hard thing to do when you are dealing with a physical product, totally disconnected.</p>
<p>Nowadays IoT devices capture various data points, effectively helping the company which made the product answer all these questions about the product – but if you are dealing with a totally disconnected / offline product like a computer desk it’s probably very hard to gather that data. I’d imagine for something like Fitbit (which I use a lot so have spent a bit of time researching them) they find it easier to figure out usage patterns and friction points but overall a physical product is harder to figure out the answers to these questions compared to something like a digital product.</p>
<p>And I think that is a crucial difference between products that I’ve worked with versus other types: the data and insights into the usage of the actual product, which I think is essential for developing an efficient user acquisition solution. Consider for instance something like LinkedIn, which I use daily: if they don’t capture enough data to figure out how the users are using the service and what are the things that they like/dislike it’s very hard for them to build an effective strategy for acquiring users for this platform. You can’t talk about growth without keeping an eye on the full funnel and what happens after you have acquired the user.</p>
<p>When I look at collaborating with a company or a team I look at this data acquisition pipeline as one of the things needed to develop a growth platform. I advise a bunch of companies as well and that is one of the questions I always ask them: how much data do you have about users and their usaging of your product? That tells you a lot and allows you to talk about growth, LTV (lifetime value) and that’s where this data comes in.</p>
<h3 id="is-your-specialization-more-focused-on-acquiring-new-customers-or-growing-engagement-of-existing-customers-what-are-you-specifically-focused-on">Is your specialization more focused on acquiring new customers or growing engagement of existing customers? What are you specifically focused on?</h3>
<p>I think this goes in waves and on top of that there are industry trends where the focus transitions from one to the other then back.</p>
<p>In the last few years my focus has been more on user acquisition. For example, previously when I was at Netflix we were going international and the focus was on how to acquire new audiences in the countries we were expanding the service to. Once we reached a certain scale then of course the focus started shifting beyond user acquisition. So it’s a combination of a few factors.</p>
<p>Similarly in MZ my focus was on new user acquisition but from the get-go we were in constant contact with the data around game usage, retention, LTV and so on and we identified that a lot of what we were doing in user acquisition could be perhaps used in game play to entice players to more engagements – which leads to longer lifetime, and therefore higher LTV, feeding back into our user acquisition.</p>
<p>So by and large I am normally brought in for new user acquisition purposes, but that often ends up touching on user engagement as the two of them together help with the larger goal which is “growth”.</p>
<h3 id="how-does-your-work-contribute-to-building-trust-with-users-to-help-persuade-them-to-use-the-product">How does your work contribute to building trust with users, to help persuade them to use the product?</h3>
<p>Trust is a hard thing to establish. It takes years to build and seconds to destroy – as the quote goes. I think you start by establishing a name for yourself in the market and not resorting to what I call creepy tactics, and you start building trust. It’s not going to come overnight, you have to work with what you have. It’s a very tough problem to solve for anyone in industry.</p>
<p>If you look at there’s a lot of focus on some of the social media companies nowadays, and I think that trust is broken right now, you know, especially in the US following the elections and a lot of other horrible things that happen. I would imagine it’s very hard right now for instance to build a user acquisition for some of these media platforms based on trust. You either have to go to extremes (which sadly some of them did) or it takes a long while once that trust is broken to kind of reestablish it.</p>
<p>One of the things that resonated with me from the beginning at Netflix was the idea of having actual values, not just nice-sounding values that look good in the press or in the office lobby. I think it starts with that: if you define these values and you stick to them then they reflect in your product and in your growth strategies and solutions. Users will value it and you can build trust based on that.</p>
<h3 id="how-does-personalization-give-a-marketing-edge-in-meeting-customer-needs-give-one-example-of-how-this-is-done-via-outbound-marketing-or-in-product-experience">How does personalization give a marketing edge in meeting customer needs? Give one example of how this is done via outbound marketing or in-product experience.</h3>
<p>I worked in adtech for about 20 years, from the early days of the annoying pop-ups and also I worked in Europe as well in the US and even in the Middle East and I have to say that I’ve seen different reactions to advertising.</p>
<p>A lot of people nowadays claim they don’t react to advertising, those companies putting adverts in front of them are just wasting their money. The very same person now is in the market for a TV, they talk to a friend and mention “Hey, I’m looking to buy a TV for my front room”, and the friend says “oh, you know, I bought recently a flat Samsung TV and it’s great picture quality and amazing voice command, you should have a look at it, <em>I highly recommend it</em>!”. And then this person goes and at least spends time looking at this TV and maybe even buying it, because in their mind this is perceived as a recommendation. They don’t even inquire “Do you have any affiliation or something with Samsung?”, they just go and probably buy the TV. (And to be fair in most cases probably people aren’t affiliated with the brand they recommend, but even in the above situation they found out their friend had some sort of affiliation with the brand, they still go ahead, because, well, it’s a recommendation from a friend I trust!) And that’s I think where personalization helps.</p>
<p>In my mind great advertising is something that is so fluid and to the point that you don’t see it–it doesn’t break the user experience.</p>
<p>Where personalization comes in is making really small but really deep differentiation between advertising which is perceived by most people as breaking their experience, and advertising that’s no longer an advertisement. It’s a recommendation.</p>
<p>It is then perceived by the user as “<strong><em>somebody put thought–it’s essential that I say “somebody” because the audience thinks of somebody generating the recommendation, even if machines are doing it – in putting this in front of me!</em></strong>”. So psychologically I think people react to recommendations and personalization in a more positive manner than they would just random spray-and-pray.</p>
<h3 id="what-is-your-favorite-marketing-channel-or-platform-and-why-eg-out-of-home-organic-search-email-tv-etc">What is your favorite marketing channel or platform, and why? E.g. out-of-home, organic search, email, TV, etc.</h3>
<p>I’ll start by saying that I think out-of-home advertising is about to see an explosion. It all started there with banners on the streets. That type of advertising became “dumb” advertising because you just put a board on there and you don’t really measure who’s looking at it. Nielsen and so on do do a pretty good job of it, but I have met through the Endeavor network companies that provide out-of-home advertising analytics and actually get the data in near real-time, similar to web and mobile.</p>
<p>While it might seem paradoxical I think that we’ll see an interesting explosion and growth in it, and at that point it will be a contender as one of my favorites.</p>
<p>Currently however, my favorite marketing channel is mobile – it is so ubiquitous and so omnipresent that it makes it such an effective channel for anything marketing!</p>
<h3 id="whats-the-largest-single-marketing-initiative-or-ab-test-spend-audience-size-etc-youve-participated-in-and-what-lessons-did-you-learn-from-it">What’s the largest single marketing initiative or A/B test (spend, audience-size, etc.) you’ve participated in and what lessons did you learn from it?</h3>
<p>I will probably have to jog my memory back to my Netflix times as the marketing budgets there were very generous. We have seen budgets for the launch of CrystalBorne in MachineZone in 8 digits, and those were successful campaigns too but Netflix, due to its size, outweighs everything else I have done by far.</p>
<p>It’s hard though to pinpoint the largest – Netflix is known for constantly A/B testing pretty much everything. We ran experiments on different ad formats, different visual templates, different targeting criteria for titles and creatives.</p>
<h3 id="what-accomplishment-are-you-most-proud-of-in-your-career-so-far-if-none-come-to-mind-what-are-you-most-looking-forward-to">What accomplishment are you most proud of in your career so far? If none come to mind, what are you most looking forward to?</h3>
<p>I was part of the team which helped Netflix go global and get to 100MM members worldwide, then 150MM (that party was sick!). And to top it off I then went on to help MachineZone launch CrystalBorne globally and reach millions of mobile users within the first few weeks.</p>
<p>I’m now looking forward to helping <a href="https://tubitv.com/">Tubi</a> become a household name.</p>
<h2 id="related-links">Related Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://liviutudor.com">Liviu Tudor – Of Man and Internet</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/liviutudor">Liviu Tudor (@liviutudor)</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/liviutudor/">Liviu Tudor - AVP Growth Engineering - Tubi (LinkedIn)</a></li>
</ul>Max MautnerWhat do you do professionally, in your own words?Paula Reinman2021-01-28T00:00:00+00:002021-01-28T00:00:00+00:00https://www.thatoneweirdtrick.com/posts/2021/01/28/paula-reinman<h3 id="what-do-you-do-professionally-in-your-own-words">What do you do professionally, in your own words?</h3>
<p>I do marketing and communications consulting for social impact organizations. I work primarily with organizations that are using technology for good to create affordable and scalable solutions to problems like financial inclusion, remote learning, digital health, and bridging the digital divide.</p>
<h3 id="what-might-be-different-about-your-experience-in-marketing-for-social-impact-organizations-vs-marketing-for-other-types-of-companies">What might be different about your experience in marketing for social impact organizations vs. marketing for other types of companies?</h3>
<p>While I focus on the technology for good space, I grew up in traditional B2B and B2C technology organizations. The marketing motion is really the same for both. Whether you’re doing tech for good or you’re in a straight commercial venture, you still need to understand your customer base, the messages that really resonate with your market and how stakeholders will want to hear from you. In general, tech marketers are not particularly good at talking about the true benefits that their products deliver in a jargon-free way that resonates with their customer base. The other thing that I see in the tech for good space is difficulty in integrating consistent and cohesive messaging around how they are changing the world for their customers, rather than tacking on the “for good” as an afterthought.</p>
<h3 id="are-you-currently-more-focused-on-the-problem-of-acquiring-new-customers-or-growing-engagement-of-existing-customers-what-are-you-specifically-focused-on">Are you currently more focused on the problem of acquiring new customers or growing engagement of existing customers? What are you specifically focused on?</h3>
<p>I do both, depending on what clients need, since I work with them on marketing and communications strategies. Because my background is in building new markets, I do a bit more in the area of customer acquisition. Whether it’s an acquisition or retention issue, organizations need to understand who their market is or what their overall messaging could be. I also consult on building relationships and awareness through social media and expanding relationships within existing client bases.</p>
<h3 id="how-does-your-work-contribute-to-building-trust-with-users-in-order-to-persuade-them-to-use-your-clients-productsservices">How does your work contribute to building trust with users, in order to persuade them to use your clients’ products/services?</h3>
<p>I think the work that I do builds trust because it is based on direct input from the market. A lot of the work that I do focuses on interacting directly with audiences to find the right messages, the right positioning and the right benefit and value points.</p>
<p>I talk directly with customers and stakeholders and test different ideas and concepts with them to really see what resonates. So when my clients use the messaging and communication strategies and tactics that I’ve created for them, they are inherently customer-driven.</p>
<h3 id="from-your-perspective-how-does-personalization-give-a-marketing-edge-can-you-give-one-concrete-example-of-how-this-is-done-via-outbound-marketing-or-in-product-experience">From your perspective, how does personalization give a marketing edge? Can you give one concrete example of how this is done via outbound marketing or in-product experience?</h3>
<p>One of the best examples I can think of is creating a new website for a B2B tech company. In this case, we had a lot of intelligence about the particular problem that we solved and we had a lot of information by sector, size of company and the like. We created an assessment on our website that let the user enter information about their business and then we gave them a data-driven assessment about how far along they were in their maturity cycle for this particular situation. Prospects could ask for a conversation with a business development rep to gain further insights. This became a really popular part of our website and our best lead generation tool that year.</p>
<h3 id="what-is-your-favorite-marketing-channel-or-platform-and-why-eg-out-of-home-organic-search-email-tv-etc">What is your favorite marketing channel or platform, and why? E.g. out-of-home, organic search, email, TV, etc.</h3>
<p>I don’t really have a favorite. Different tools are best for different situations.</p>
<p>If we’re talking lead generation, I would say a combination of Google ads and content syndication. By content syndication, I mean high quality content that appears in different places that customers and prospects frequent.</p>
<h3 id="what-is-your-one-weird-trick-of-approaching-marketing">What is your one weird trick of approaching marketing?</h3>
<p>Ask the customer–talk to them about their problems, what you’re offering and what benefits it can bring them. Practically every time I do this, I get surprising answers.</p>
<p>One example is what I found working with an organization that has an application for factory workers in developing countries that allows them to report unsafe working conditions or unfair labor practices. I talked to workers about what the value was of this application, thinking that they would be motivated by being able to report problems with factory management. It turned out that they were most excited about being the first ones to have this application on their phone and being perceived as tech leaders by showing others how to use it. So this application was essentially an influencer and status tool for early adopter factory workers.</p>
<p>Another recent example is an organization I worked with that has an application on college campuses built to help survivors of sexual assault. We wanted to make sure that students knew about the service and that it was top of mind if they needed it. I tested a variety of messaging and found that what really resonated most was the idea of knowing about the application so that they could tell a friend who had experienced sexual assault. Because it’s really hard for 18-19 year old students to think that this might happen to them, the idea of helping a friend is much easier to focus on.</p>
<p>These are a couple of examples of things that were different than I would have expected in terms of how to get people to pay attention and engage with a product.</p>
<h3 id="whats-the-largest-single-marketing-initiative-spend-audience-size-etc-youve-participated-in-and-what-lessons-did-you-learn-from-it">What’s the largest single marketing initiative (spend, audience-size, etc.) you’ve participated in and what lessons did you learn from it?</h3>
<p>There have been a lot of big ones. One interesting example is repositioning an organization from a services company to a Software-as-a-Service company.</p>
<p>When you are a services company, people hand over their problem to you. You do what you need to do in order to solve the problem, tie it up with a bow and make it look great for them. In the SaaS world, your processes and interfaces are in full view and your product has to be friendly and scalable for all kinds of users.</p>
<p>Repositioning a company from services to SaaS was a very big project and we had a multi-pronged approach that touched all departments from product development to sales and customer success to analyst and media relations. We had an extremely successful “coming out” party at one of the industry’s largest trade shows, accompanied by significant media, analyst and investor relations outreach.</p>
<p>It’s hard to overestimate how difficult it is to really reposition your entire company.</p>
<p>One of the things that contributed to a successful repositioning is a program I started, in collaboration with our Chief Learning Officer, for first and second line managers. While executives have information about major changes, it is often slow to trickle down to the place where the rubber really meets the road - the first and second line managers supporting the people who are on the phone with customers and prospects all day long. When things were changing fast, having consistent and direct dialogue with these managers helped us understand the questions they were coming in and enabled us to provide guidance so that the people closest to the customer have answers and information.</p>
<h3 id="what-accomplishment-are-you-most-proud-of-in-your-career-so-far">What accomplishment are you most proud of in your career so far?</h3>
<p>My biggest accomplishments are when the people who work for me or have worked for me are able to fulfill their ambitions. Whether that means getting promoted, starting their own businesses or moving into a totally new field, if I am able to help them understand their personal north star and move toward it, then I have done my best work.</p>
<p>Just this morning I was emailing with somebody who used to work for me, asking her for her expertise on an issue, and she told me “Just yesterday I was thinking about a career discussion that you and I had seven years ago that really laid the framework for where I wanted to go.”</p>
<h3 id="what-are-you-most-looking-forward-to-working-on">What are you most looking forward to working on?</h3>
<p>I’m actually working on a passion project with a long-time friend and colleague who has the movie rights to a young adult novel by Jerry Spinelli and it’s called <em><a href="https://milkweedthemovie.com/">Milkweed</a></em>. It’s a book about a young boy in the Holocaust and it’s about empathy, kindness and identity. My friend has gotten a grant from the <a href="https://www.covenantfn.org/">Covenant Foundation</a> that focuses on Jewish education. We are creating pilot curriculum for 18 schools to use this fall and plan to roll out to middle schools nationwide in the fall of 2022. We are also working on funding for a movie adaptation of the book.</p>
<h3 id="related-links">Related Links</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulareinman/">Paula Reinman (LinkedIn)</a></li>
<li><a href="www.impactful-marketing.com">Impactful-Marketing.com</a></li>
</ul>Max MautnerWhat do you do professionally, in your own words?Neil Shah, Lyft2021-01-24T00:00:00+00:002021-01-24T00:00:00+00:00https://www.thatoneweirdtrick.com/posts/2021/01/24/neil-shah<h3 id="what-does-lyft-do-in-your-own-words">What does Lyft do in your own words?</h3>
<p>Lyft is improving people’s lives with the world’s best transportation. I’ve had the great luck to work at several mission driven companies and I can’t recommend it enough. On the first day of orientation at Lyft we visited one of the most expensive real estate properties in SF—it was a waterfront parking lot by the baseball stadium. We were asked to imagine a city built around people with parks not parking lots. I was instilled with a vision to change the world through better transportation – it’s powerful and incredibly motivating.</p>
<h3 id="what-do-you-do-at-lyft">What do you do at Lyft?</h3>
<p>Over the last few years I’ve moved into the trust & safety space, as a product manager. Specifically, at Twitter I worked on information integrity during the elections, now I build Identity products focused on a safer experience for riders and drivers.</p>
<h3 id="what-might-be-different-about-marketing-car-sharing-vs-other-types-of-productsservices">What might be different about marketing car-sharing vs. other types of products/services?</h3>
<p>Most tech companies are purely online and users can be anonymous, but at Lyft we have strangers riding in the car together. That difference changes how we approach building product, especially from a trust perspective. This is because the challenges of dealing with offline harm are high stakes. Another difference is the three sided marketplace: Lyft, riders, drivers – we’re constantly juggling and the complexity is not apparent until you’re face-to-face building product.</p>
<h3 id="on-your-team-are-you-currently-more-focused-on-acquiring-new-customers-or-growing-engagement-of-existing-customers-what-are-you-specifically-focused-on">On your team, are you currently more focused on acquiring new customers or growing engagement of existing customers? What are you specifically focused on?</h3>
<p>Being more focused on trust work, there are inevitable battles with growth opportunities. For example, if you require identity verification for safety, you’re adding friction to the experience which can cause acquisition tradeoffs. I’ve found that many times you can align interests by thinking about second order effects, for example, if you felt unsafe as a driver you might leave the platform – so if we added safety constraints on the rider side, say like checking for face masks, could that impact driver supply even if it meant losing some users? These are necessary and challenging questions to think through and I often put myself in the shoes of my counterparts in growth teams to ensure I understand where they are coming from.</p>
<h3 id="how-does-your-work-contribute-to-building-trust-with-users-in-order-to-persuade-them-to-use-lyft">How does your work contribute to building trust with users, in order to persuade them to use Lyft?</h3>
<p>One of the most fun projects I worked on was building a way to book rides for other people. With rideshare apps it’s common to <a href="https://eng.lyft.com/building-a-seamless-experience-to-request-a-ride-for-others-b80f09db6aa2">book a ride for someone else</a>, but guess what—the driver doesn’t know that! So here they are trying to find you but it’s actually someone else–it can be a terrifying experience. So, with that in mind we set out to build foundational elements that could improve driver safety with the correct passenger pickup identity. Convincing a large group of people across 16 teams was no walk in the park, but we dug up business metrics related to things like cancellation rates and wrong passenger pickups that would likely improve with the product. By addressing concerns we were able to build and launch this feature which had great rider/driver impact as well as business impact.</p>
<h3 id="how-do-you-measure-the-impact-of-trust-work">How do you measure the impact of trust work?</h3>
<p>It’s pretty difficult, but simplicity is key – you shouldn’t have to take more than 1-2 min explaining a metric, think of it as your elevator pitch. And in the long run, there should be an inarguable trust sentiment element, such as ‘drivers feel safer’. This can be harder to measure casually, however. In one project, I listed a number of future product concepts the company could unlock new business opportunities on the foundation we were creating. I highly recommend doing listening and vision tours to ensure alignment.</p>
<h3 id="what-was-your-time-at-twitter-like">What was your time at Twitter like?</h3>
<p>It’s hard to imagine, but back in 2015/16 the company was in a dire state–morale was low, attrition was high, the stock was low, and product leadership was a revolving door. Jack Dorsey gave the company and their employees a simple mission and purpose–’be the conversational layer of the internet’. Twitter didn’t really have an identity before that, it was really hard to explain the core strategy. I also learned that, at public companies, it’s easy to be short sighted with quarter to quarter planning. Jack has a very long term perspective and that can be a game changer in product work. I’m grateful for my time there and feel so lucky to have had the opportunity to work on information integrity there.</p>
<h3 id="what-accomplishment-are-you-most-proud-of-in-your-career-so-far-if-none-come-to-mind-what-are-you-most-looking-forward-to">What accomplishment are you most proud of in your career so far? If none come to mind, what are you most looking forward to?</h3>
<p>Most products we ship are fleeting, they’ll likely be gone in 7-10 years, if not sooner. There was a project I was so proud of at Twitter, then someone went and killed it a few months back. Things change, right? So instead of pointing to specific projects, I’ve been searching for lasting impact. One way is by giving back to the community, by helping folks start their careers in product management and advising minorities/women negotiate for higher compensation (via <a href="https://www.81cents.com/">81cents</a>, tip: ask for more). This has by far been the most rewarding experiences for me. I’ve had the luck of some great mentors along with my decade in product and tech and I’m really happy to be able to pass some of that knowledge along–please reach out!</p>
<h2 id="related-links">Related Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.medium.com/@npshah">Neil Shah (Medium)</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.twitter.com/npshah">Neil Shah (Twitter)</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/tahoensuh/">Neil Shah (LinkedIn)</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.lyft.com/">Lyft</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.81cents.com">81cents</a></li>
</ul>Max MautnerWhat does Lyft do in your own words?Max Mautner, Netflix2021-01-18T00:00:00+00:002021-01-18T00:00:00+00:00https://www.thatoneweirdtrick.com/posts/2021/01/18/max-mautner<h3 id="what-does-netflix-do-in-your-own-words">What does Netflix do, in your own words?</h3>
<p><a href="https://www.netflix.com/">Netflix</a> aims to entertain the world. Anytime someone seeks to be entertained they can open Netflix and see stories that will delight them.</p>
<h3 id="what-might-be-different-about-marketing-netflix-vs-other-types-of-productsservices">What might be different about marketing Netflix vs. other types of products/services?</h3>
<p>Competition among entertainment products is fierce, but customers often buy from multiple offerings (unlike your home cable provider).</p>
<p>Personalizing the content you see and associate with Netflix is key to persuading new and current customers to select Netflix as their entertainment of the moment, whether on a phone, a laptop, a TV, or otherwise. Supporting so many streaming devices creates a lot of opportunity to be accessible for customers.</p>
<h3 id="on-your-team-are-you-currently-more-focused-on-acquiring-new-customers-or-growing-engagement-of-existing-customers-what-are-you-specifically-focused-on">On your team, are you currently more focused on acquiring new customers or growing engagement of existing customers? What are you specifically focused on?</h3>
<p>I specifically work on supporting payments, primarily via messaging (email, SMS, push notifications, etc.). For example, projects that might support a new method of payment benefit customer acquisition as well as retention. This is an important initiative as Netflix has become a global business (it started with service limited to the United States market), because different payment methods are used by different parts of the world.</p>
<h3 id="how-does-your-work-contribute-to-building-trust-with-users-in-order-to-persuade-them-to-use-netflix">How does <em>your work</em> contribute to building trust with users, in order to persuade them to use Netflix?</h3>
<p>Since I work in the area of outbound messaging, it’s critical to send messages that are on-brand and combat the impression of those messages being phishing and fraud. This can be done in many ways, but growth messaging is one such critical vector.</p>
<h3 id="how-does-personalization-give-a-marketing-edge-in-meeting-customer-needs-give-one-example-of-how-this-is-done-via-outbound-marketing-or-in-product-experience">How does personalization give a marketing edge in meeting customer needs? Give one example of how this is done via outbound marketing or in-product experience.</h3>
<p>The most obvious is the Netflix homepage. What one customer sees when they open Netflix may be very different than another–e.g. I hate the horror genre, so I often see comedy titles on my homepage, while yours may be very different! This is key to entertaining such a diverse set of viewers as Netflix has got, and it carries over to the messages we send to customers.</p>
<p>I can speak more about previous employers, in which case I’d give one example of segmenting email audiences by their email account provider (e.g. Gmail, Hotmail). Deliverability is critical, and personalizing your sending to segments based on their email provider can help isolate damage to your reputation as an email sender (i.e. preventing your emails from being flagged and routed to recipients’ spam folders).</p>
<h3 id="what-is-your-favorite-marketing-channel-or-platform-and-why-eg-out-of-home-organic-search-email-tv-etc">What is your favorite marketing channel or platform, and why? E.g. out-of-home, organic search, email, TV, etc.</h3>
<p>Email is my personal favorite–it’s what I worked on first in my career at <a href="https://www.cogolabs.com/">Cogo Labs</a> & <a href="https://www.everquote.com/">EverQuote</a>, and what I think makes me most optimistic about the internet: any person can contact any other person on Earth for free, assuming that they both have an email address. This obviously scales to B2C communication as well with some meaningful differences in etiquette and software engineering.</p>
<h3 id="whats-the-largest-single-marketing-initiative-spend-audience-size-etc-youve-participated-in-and-what-lessons-did-you-learn-from-it">What’s the largest single marketing initiative (spend, audience-size, etc.) you’ve participated in and what lessons did you learn from it?</h3>
<p>I guess you could say the largest audience I’ve worked on is search engine & display marketing where you can reach a massive number of distinct impressions–although they may or may not be real people encountering your ads! That is a whole entire topic in its own right…this was at EverQuote 6 years ago, when we were spending $1 million/month on AdWords. I’d guess their budget is much bigger now that they’ve gone public and are valued at over $1 billion.</p>
<p>These days the audiences I work with at Netflix involve messaging (e.g. email) where the audience sizes are proportional to the customer base.</p>
<p>I’d say one key learning from “big impact” marketing is to have safe ways to test and verify your systems are working as expected in a “dry-run” mode without spending any money/sending any messages. Once things look good as tested, everyone will feel more confident “pulling the trigger” so to speak.</p>
<h3 id="what-accomplishment-are-you-most-proud-of-in-your-career-so-far-if-none-come-to-mind-what-are-you-most-looking-forward-to">What accomplishment are you most proud of in your career so far? If none come to mind, what are you most looking forward to?</h3>
<p>I’m proud of doing a small part to help entertain well over 100 million Netflix customers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.</p>
<p>I’m also proud of producing <a href="https://theaccidentalengineer.com/">the Accidental Engineer</a> and helping share valuable career information to millions of readers & listeners about a profession that I love!</p>
<h2 id="links">Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxmautner/">Max Mautner - Senior Software Engineer - Netflix</a> (LinkedIn)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.netflix.com/">Netflix - Watch TV Shows Online, Watch Movies Online</a></li>
<li><a href="https://jobs.netflix.com/">Netflix Jobs</a></li>
<li><a href="https://theaccidentalengineer.com/">The Accidental Engineer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://maxmautner.com/">I’m Max Mautner and I’m your man</a> (maxmautner.com)</li>
<li><a href="http://twitter.com/maxmautner/">Max Mautner (@maxmautner)</a></li>
</ul>Max MautnerWhat does Netflix do, in your own words?