Podcasts about lean analytics

Nuria Ruiz es ingeniera de datos en Netflix y antes ha liderado el equipo de ingeniería de datos en Wikipedia. Ha dedicado mucho tiempo a explorar el aprovechamiento respetuoso de datos a gran escala, forjándose profesionalmente en Amazon y habiendo comenzado su carrera en el Laboratorio de Oceanografía Física de Seattle. Con Nuria hemos hablado de Lean Analytics, así como de la aplicación práctica del principio de minimización en el recabado y uso de datos, en el contexto de la boyante disciplina de ingeniería de privacidad (“Privacy Engineering”). También hemos tocado Privacy Enhancing Technologies y ejemplos muy concretos de mejores prácticas.  Referencias:  Nuria Ruiz en LinkedIn Resumen de ponencias en PEPR'24 (USENIX Conference on Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect) Damien Desfontaines: Differential Privacy in Data Clean Rooms (Masters of Privacy) Luke Mulks - Brave: privacy-preserving ads (Masters of Privacy).

Alistair Croll is the co-author of the best-selling book Lean Analytics and a longtime product manager, entrepreneur, and startup advisor. He was also instrumental in my starting a company, funding it, and helping us exit to Airbnb as part of his Year One Labs incubator. He's chaired notable events such as O'Reilly's Strata and UBM's Cloud Connect and founded FWD50. In our conversation, we focus on lessons from an upcoming book by Alistair and his co-author, Emily Ross, Just Evil Enough, which is set for release in late 2024. We cover:• The importance of subversive marketing strategies in most startups' growth• 11 specific subversive tactics that successful companies have used• Examples of companies like Netflix, Airbnb, and Tesla that used clever tactics early on• A framework for scanning your market for opportunities• The importance of finding your “zero-day marketing exploit”• How to apply these tactics ethically without actually being evil• Much more—Brought to you by:• WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs• Hex—Helping teams ask and answer data questions by working together• Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security—Find the transcript and show notes at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/just-evil-enough-alistair-croll—Where to find Alistair Croll:• X: https://x.com/acroll• Threads: https://www.threads.net/@alistairish• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alistaircroll/• Website: https://justevilenough.com/• Substack: https://acroll.substack.com/• Just Evil Enough on X: https://x.com/evilenough• Just Evil Enough on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/just-evil-enough/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Alistair's background (02:00) The story behind Alistair and Emily's book Just Evil Enough(06:17) Examples of subversive tactics(07:43) The importance of unfair advantage(10:36) The origin of the title “Just Evil Enough”(14:24) System awareness and novelty(19:16) How to use this thinking successfully (22:37) Normalizing disagreeable thinking (25:49) Recon canvas and market scanning(32:43) 11 tactics for subversive marketing(57:01) Implementing subversive strategies(01:05:01) Ethical considerations in marketing(01:08:19) Lightning round—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Neste episódio de Product Guru's, exploramos em profundidade as melhores práticas de gestão de produto e a importância de alinhar métricas ao objetivo do negócio. Nossa convidada, Yas Avancini, especialista em Produto de uma multinacional, compartilha como estratégias como o Business Canvas e métricas de input e output podem transformar a eficiência do time de produto e gerar impacto significativo. A conversa aborda o papel das métricas de curto e longo prazo, a importância de relacionamentos entre áreas e como o Product Manager pode se comunicar eficazmente com diferentes stakeholders para otimizar resultados. Esse episódio é essencial para quem deseja compreender como conectar o trabalho de produto à estratégia de negócio e navegar entre métricas acionáveis e métricas de impacto. /// Onde encontrar os convidados: Yas Avancini | Group Product Manager - Venda Direta Internacional @ Grupo Boticário https://www.linkedin.com/in/yas-avancini /// Conteúdos complementares: Framework MeMo: https://medium.com/@yas.avancini/framework-memo-suba-o-sarrafo-como-product-manager-f6fbe4a5e5b6Meu Medium com todos os artigos: https://medium.com/@yas.avanciniLivros citados: 1 - Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster2 - Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon3 - Cracking the PM Career /// Nesse episódio abordamos • A estratégia de produto deve alinhar-se à missão e objetivos estratégicos da empresa para maior impacto. • O Business Canvas ajuda a definir propostas de valor claras e focadas no usuário-alvo. • Métricas de input (acionáveis) facilitam ajustes rápidos e correções direcionadas em produtos. • Conectar métrica de produto e de negócio ajuda a mensurar impacto e a criar um alinhamento estratégico. • Manter uma boa comunicação com stakeholders permite aos PMs justificar decisões de produto com base em métricas. • Práticas de soft skills, como comunicação e influência, são essenciais para que o PM traduza dados técnicos. • Em startups, o foco em aprendizado e descoberta do Product-Market Fit é crucial. • Em momentos de incerteza, métricas qualitativas e feedback direto dos usuários são fundamentais. • O uso de frameworks como o Lean Analytics auxilia na escolha de métricas de forma estratégica. • Manter uma visão pragmática e iterativa para implementação de métricas evita o excesso de dados e desperdício de recursos. /// Capítulos 00:00 Introdução 01:26 Visão sobre Estratégia de Produto e Business Canvas 02:21 Desafios e Oportunidades na Gestão de Produto Global 04:21 Conectando Métricas de Produto e Negócio 06:06 Estratégia Top-Down e sua Aplicação no Produto 10:58 Tipos de Métricas: Negócio, Produto e Input 16:18 Importância de Conhecimento Técnico para Product Managers 25:36 Equilibrando Métricas de Curto e Longo Prazo 37:37 Comunicar o Roadmap e Métricas entre Stakeholders 51:09 Lidando com Incertezas e Dados Limitados no Produto 57:11 Estratégias para PMs em Ambientes sem Dados Estruturados /// Oferecimento Tera — Um novo futuro para sua carreira. Acesse: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠somostera.com use o cupom de desconto PRODUCT_GURUS para desconto exclusivo. Amplitude — A maior plataforma de Product Analytics do mundo Ebook sobre Product Analytics: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.productminds.io/resources/product-analytics-for-dummies

What do lizards have to do with product growth? In this episode, Gojko Adzic reveals how unusual user behaviors can unlock massive opportunities for product innovation. Discover the four steps to mastering "Lizard Optimization" and learn how you can turn strange user actions into game-changing insights. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, host Brian Milner chats with Gojko Adzic about his new book, Lizard Optimization. Gojko explains the concept of finding product growth signals in strange user behaviors, sharing examples where unexpected user actions led to product breakthroughs. He outlines a four-step process for optimizing products by learning, zeroing in, removing obstacles, and double-checking. Gojko also discusses helpful tools like session recorders and observability tools that can enhance product development by uncovering and addressing unique user behaviors. References and resources mentioned in the show: Gojko Adzic 50% OFF Lizard Optimization by Gojko Adzic Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design by Kat Holmes Trustworthy Online Experiments by Ron Kohavi Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner® Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Join the Agile Mentors Community Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Gojko Adzic is an award-winning software consultant and author, specializing in agile and lean quality improvement, with expertise in impact mapping, agile testing, and behavior-driven development. A frequent speaker at global software conferences, Gojko is also a co-creator of MindMup and Narakeet, and has helped companies worldwide enhance their software delivery, from large financial institutions to innovative startups. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today, very special guest we have with us. have Mr. Goiko Atshich with us. I hope I said that correctly. Did I say it correctly? Close enough. Okay. Well, welcome in, Goiko. Glad to have you here. Gojko (00:15) Close enough, close enough. Brian (00:21) Very, very, very happy to have Goiko with us. If you're not familiar with Goiko's name, you probably are familiar with some of his work. One of the things I was telling him that we teach in our advanced product owner class every time is impact mapping, which is a tool that Goiko has written about and kind of come up with on his own as well. Gojko (00:21) Thank you very much for inviting me. Brian (00:47) But today we're having him on because he has a new book coming out called Lizard Optimization, Unlock Product Growth by Engaging Long Tail Users. And I really wanted to talk to him about that and help him explain, have him explain to us a little bit about this idea, this new concept that his new book is about. So, Goiko, let's talk about it. Lizard Optimization, in a nutshell, what do you mean by that? What is it? Gojko (01:14) We're going to jump into that, but I just need to correct one of the things you said. I think it's very, very important. You said I came up with impact mapping and I didn't. I just wrote a popular book about that. And it's very important to credit people who actually came up with that. It's kind of the in -use design agency in Sweden. And I think, you know, they should get the credit for it. I literally just wrote a popular book. Brian (01:19) Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha, gotcha. Apologies for that incorrect. Thank you for making that correction. So lizard optimization. Gojko (01:44) So, lizard optimization. Good. So, lizard optimization is an idea to find signals for product ideas and product development ideas in strange user behaviors. When you meet somebody who does something you completely do not understand, why on earth somebody would do something like that? Brian (02:03) Okay. Gojko (02:11) and it looks like it's not done by humans, it looks like it's done by somebody who follows their own lizard logic, using stuff like that as signals to improve our products. Not just for lizards, but for everybody. So the idea came from a very explosive growth phase for one of the products I'm working on, where it... had lots of people doing crazy things I could never figure out why they were doing it. For example, one of the things the tool does is it helps people create videos from PowerPoints. You put some kind of your voiceover in the speaker notes, the tool creates a video by using text to speech engines to create voiceover from the speaker notes, aligns everything and it's all kind of for you. People kept creating blank videos and paying me for this. I was thinking about why on earth would somebody be creating blank videos and it must be a bug and if it's a bug then they want their money back and they'll complain. So I chased up a few of these people and I tried to kind of understand what's going on because I originally thought we have a bug in the development pipeline for the videos. So... I started asking like, you know, I'm using some, I don't know, Google slides or, you know, keynote or whatever to produce PowerPoints. Maybe there's a bug how we read that. And the person, no, no, we, know, official Microsoft PowerPoint. They said, well, can you please open the PowerPoint you uploaded? Do you see anything on the slides when you open it? And the person, no, it's blank. Right? Okay, so it's blank for you as well. I said, yeah. So. Brian (03:48) Yeah. Gojko (03:54) What's going on? so what I've done is through UX interviews and iterating with users and research, we've made it very, very easy to do advanced configuration on text -to -speech. And it was so much easier than the alternative things that people were creating blank PowerPoints just to use the text -to -speech engines so they can then extract the audio track from it. Brian (03:54) Yeah, why? Gojko (04:23) and then use that and it was this whole mess of obstacles I was putting in front of people to get the good audio. It wasn't the original intention of the tool. It wasn't the original value, but people were getting unintended value from it. And then I ended up building just a very simple screen for people to upload the Word document instead of PowerPoints. And it was much faster for users to do that. A month later, there was many audio files being built as videos. Two months later, audio... production overtook video production. then at the moment, people are building many, many more audio files than video files on the platform. So it was an incredible growth because of this kind of crazy insight of what people were doing. kind of usually, at least kind of in the products I worked on before, when you have somebody abusing the product, product management fight against it. There's a wonderful story about this in... Founders at work a book by Jessica Livingston and she talks about this kind of group of super smart people in late 90s who Came up with a very very efficient Cryptography algorithm and a way to compute the cryptography so they can run it on low -power devices like Paul pilots Paul pilots were you know like mobile phones, but in late 90s and Then they had to figure out, how do we monetize this? Why would anybody want to do this? So they came up with the idea to do money transfer pumping, Palm pilots, you know, why not? And kind of the built a website. This was the late nineties as a way of just demoing this software to people who didn't have a Palm pilot device next to them. The idea was that you'd kind of see it on the website, learn about it, then maybe download the Palm pilot app and use it in anger. People kept just using the website, they're not downloading the Palm Pilot app. So the product management really wasn't happy. And they were trying to push people from the website to the Palm Pilot app. were trying to, they were fighting against people using this for money transfer on the web and even prohibiting them from using the logo and advertising it. They had this whole thing where nobody could explain why users were using the website because it was a demo thing. It was not finished. It was not sexy. It was just silly. And Jessica kind of talks to one of these people who insists that it was totally inexplicable. Nobody could understand it. But then a bit later, they realized that the website had one and half million users and that the Pongpilot app had 12 ,000 users. So they kind of decided, well, that's where the product is really. And that's like today, people know them as PayPal. They're one of the biggest payment processes in the world because kind of, you know, they realized this is where the product is going. And I think in many, many companies, people Brian (07:03) Ha ha. Gojko (07:18) stumble upon these things as happy accidents. And I think there's a lot more to it. We can deliberately optimize products by looking for unintended usage and not fighting it, just not fighting it. just understand this is what people are getting as value. And I think for me as a solo product founder and developer and product manager on it, One of the really interesting things is when you have somebody engaging with your product in an unexpected way, most of the difficult work for that user is already done. That person knows about you, they're on your website or they're using your product, the marketing and acquisition work is done. But something's preventing them from achieving their goals or they're achieving some value that you did not really know that they're going to achieve. you know, that's something the product can do to help them and remove these obstacles to success. So that's kind of what lizard optimization is making this process more systematic rather than relying on happy accidents. And by making it more systematic, then we can help product management not fight it and skip this whole phase of trying to fight against our users and claim that users are stupid or non -technical or... They don't understand the product, but they're trying to figure out, well, that's what the real goals are. And then following that. Brian (08:47) That's awesome. So the pivot, right? The pivot from here's what we thought our problem was we were solving to now here's what we're actually solving and we should organize around this actual problem, right? Gojko (09:02) or here's what we're going to solve additionally. This is the problem we've solved, but hey, there's this problem as well. And then the product can grow by solving multiple problems for people and solving related problems and solving it for different groups of people, for example. And that's the really interesting thing because I think if you have a product that's already doing something well for your users and a subset of them are misusing it in some way, then kind of... Brian (09:04) Yeah. Gojko (09:30) The product might already be optimized for the majority of users, but there might be a new market somewhere else. So there might be a different market where we can help kind of a different group of users and then the product can grow. Brian (09:43) Yeah, I like to focus on the user. There's an exercise that we'll do in one of our product owner classes where we have a fake product that is a smart refrigerator. And one of the exercises we try to get them to brainstorm the different kinds of users that they might have for it. And one of the things that always comes out in that class is as they're going through and trying to describe the types of users, they inevitably hit to this crossroads where they start to decide Well, yes, we're thinking of this as a home product, something for people to use in their homes. But then the idea crosses their mind, well, what about commercial kitchens? What about people who might use this in another setting? And it's always an interesting conversation to say, well, now you've got a strategic choice to make, because you can target both. You can target one. You can say, we're ignoring the other and we're only going in this direction. So to me, I think that's kind of one of the interesting crossroad points is to say, how do I know when it's time to not just say, great, we have this other customer segment that we didn't know about, but actually we should start to pivot towards that customer segment and start to really target them. Gojko (11:03) Yeah, think that's a fundamental question of product development, isn't it? Do you keep true to your vision even if it's not coming out or if something else is there that's kind more important than I think? For me, there's a couple of aspects to that. One is, laser focus is really important to launch a product. You can't launch a product by targeting... the whole market and targeting a niche type, figuring out, you know, user personas, figuring out like really, really, this is the product who we think the product, this is the group who we think the product is for and giving them a hundred percent of what they need is much better than giving 2 % to everybody because then the product is irrelevant. But then to grow the product, we need to kind of grow the user base as well. And I think one of the things that... is interesting to look at and this comes from a book called Lean Analytics. It's one of my kind of favorite product management books is to look at the frequency and urgency of usage. If you have a group that's kind of using your product, a subgroup that's using your product very frequently compared to everybody else, that might be kind of the place where you want to go. The more frequently, the more urgently people reach for your product when they have this problem. the more likely they are going to be a good market for it. with kind of another product that I've launched in 2013, we originally thought it's going to be a product for professional users. And we aimed at the professional users. And then we found that a subcategory that we didn't really expect, were kind of teachers and children in schools. we're using it a lot more frequently than professional users. And then we started simplifying the user interface significantly so that it can be used by children. And it's a very, very popular tool in schools now. We are not fighting against other professional tools. We were kind of really one of the first in the education market there. And it's still a very popular tool in the education market because we figured a subgroup that's using it very frequently. Brian (13:14) Hmm. Yeah, that's awesome. How do you know when, you know, what kind of threshold do you look for to determine that, this is, because, you know, in your book, you're talking about, you know, behaviors that are not normal, right? People using your product in a way that you didn't anticipate. And what kind of threshold do you look for to that says, hey, it's worth investigating this? You know, I've got this percentage or this number of people who are using it in this strange way. At what point do you chase that down? Gojko (13:49) I think it's wrong to look at the percentages there. I think it's wrong to look at the percentages because then you get into the game of trying to justify economically helping 0 .1 % of the users. And that's never going to happen because what I like about this is an idea from Microsoft's Inclusive Design and the work of Kat Holmes who wrote a book called Mismatch on Brian (13:52) Okay. Gojko (14:17) assistive technologies and inclusive design for disabled people. And she talks about how it's never ever ever going to be economically justified to optimize a product to help certain disabilities because there's just not enough of them. And there's a lovely example from Microsoft where, Microsoft Inclusive Design Handbook where they talk about three types of, Brian (14:34) Yeah. Gojko (14:44) disabilities, one are permanent. So you have like people without an arm or something like that. And I'm going to kind of throw some numbers out now, order of magnitude stuff. I have these details in the book and there's kind of the micro -inclusive design handbook. Let's say at the moment, the 16 ,000 people in the U .S. without one arm or with a disabled arm. And then you have these kind of situational disabilities where because of an occupation like you have a bartender who needs to carry something all the time or a worker who does it, one arm is not available and they only have one arm to work on and this temporary like a mother carrying a child or something like that. So the other two groups are order of magnitude 20 -30 million. We're not, by making the software work well with one hand, we're not helping 16 ,000 people, we are helping 50 million people. But you don't know that you're helping 50 million people if you're just thinking about like 16 ,000. I think they have this kind of, one of the key ideas of inclusive design is solve for one, kind of help, design for one, but solve for many. So we are actually helping many, many people there. So think when you figure out that somebody is doing something really strange with your product, you're not helping just that one person. Brian (15:45) Right, right. Hmm. Gojko (16:13) you're helping a whole class of your users by making the software better, removing the obstacles to success. this is where I, you know, going back to the PowerPoint thing I mentioned, once we started removing obstacles for people to build the audios quickly, lots of other people started using the product and people started using the product in a different way. And I think this is a lovely example of what Bruce Torazzini talks about is the complexity paradox because He's a famous UX designer and he talks about how once you give people a product, their behavior changes as a result of having the product. So the UX research we've done before there is a product or there is a feature is not completely relevant, but it's a changed context because he talks about people have a certain amount of time to do a task. And then when they have a tool to complete the task faster, they can take on a more complicated task or they can take on an additional task or do something else. I think removing obstacles to use a success is really important. Not because we're helping 0 .1 % of people who we don't understand, but because we can then improve the product for everybody. And I think that's kind of the magic of lizard optimization in a sense, where if we find these things where somebody's really getting stuck. but if we help them not get stuck, then other people will use the product in a much better way. And I think this is, know, the name lizard optimization comes from this article by Scott Alexander, who talks about the lizard man's constant in research. And the article talks about his experiences with a survey that combined some demographic and psychological data. So they were looking at where you live and what your nationality is and what gender you are and then how you respond to certain psychological questions. he said, like there's about 4 % of the answers they could not account for. And one person wrote American is gender. Several people listed Martian as nationality and things like that. some of these, he says some of these things will be people who didn't really understand the question. they were distracted, they were doing something else, or they understood the question but they filled in the wrong box because, know, the thick thumbs and small screens, or they were kind of malicious and just, you know, wanted to see what happens. when you kind of add these people together, they're not an insignificant group. kind of, he says 4%. And if... we can help these people, at least some of these people, and say reduce churn by 1%. That can compound growth. Reducing churn, keeping people around for longer is an incredible way to kind of unlock growth. going back to what we were talking about, some people might be getting stuck because they don't understand the instructions. Some people might be getting stuck because they're using the product in a way you didn't expect. And some people might just like not have the mental capacity to use it the way you expected them to be used. But if we can help these people along, then normal users can use it much, easier. And you mentioned a smart fridge. I still remember there was this one wonderful bug report we had for my other product, which is a collaboration tool. we had a bug report a while ago. that the software doesn't work when it's loaded on a fridge. And it's like, well, it was never intended to be loaded on a fridge. I have no idea how you loaded it on a fridge. It's a mind mapping diagramming tool. It's intended to be used on large screens. Where does a fridge come in? And then we started talking to this person. This was before the whole kind of COVID and work from home disaster. The user was a busy mother and she was kind of trying to collaborate with her colleagues while making breakfast. breakfast for kids and kind of running around the kitchen she wasn't able to kind of pay attention to the laptop or a phone but her fridge had a screen so she loaded the software on the fridge and was able to kind of pay attention to collaboration there and you know we of course didn't optimize the software to run on fridges that's ridiculous but we realized that some people will be using it without a keyboard and without a mouse and then we kind of restructured the toolbar, we made it so that you can use it on devices that don't have a keyboard and then the whole tablet thing exploded and now you get completely different users that don't have keyboards and things like that. I think that's where I think is looking at percentages is a losing game because then you start saying, but 0 .1 % of people use this. But yeah, I think lizard optimization is about using these signals to improve the products for everybody. Brian (21:30) That's a great example. I love that example because you're absolutely right. You're not trying to necessarily solve that one problem because you don't anticipate there's going to be a lot of people who are going to want to run that software on a fridge. However, the takeaway you had from that of, we can do this for people who don't have a keyboard or a mouse. There's another way that they might operate this that could apply to lots of different devices and lots of different scenarios. Now we're talking about a much bigger audience. Now we're talking about opening this up to larger segments of the population. I love that. I think that's a great example. I know you talk about that there's kind of a process for this. Help us understand. You don't have to give away the whole candy story here from the book, but help us kind of understand in broad, terms what kind of process people follow to try to chase these things down. Gojko (22:26) So there's like a four step process that's crystallized for me. And the book is kind of more as a, like a proposal or a process. It's something that works for me and I'm hoping that other people will try it out like that. So it might not necessarily stay like that in a few years if we talk again. And I've narrowed it down to four steps and kind of the four steps start with letters L, Z, R and D. Lizard. And it's kind of so learn how people are misusing your products, zero in on one area, on one behavior change you want to improve, then remove obstacles to use a success and then double check that what you've done actually created the impact you expected to make. I think kind of when we look at people who follow their own logic or people who follow some lizard logic you don't really understand, by definition they're doing something strange. your idea of helping them might not necessarily be effective or it might not go all the way or it might. So double checking at the end that people are actually now doing what you expect them to do or doing something better is really, really, really important. And then using signals from that to improve the kind of feedback loop is critical. I had this one case where people were getting stuck on a payment format entering tax details and The form was reasonably well explained. There was an example in the forum how to enter your tax ID and people were constantly getting stuck. A small percentage of people was getting stuck on it. However, I don't want to lose a small percentage of people that want to pay me on the payment form. So I thought, well, how about if I remove that field from there? I speed it up for everybody and then I can guide them later into entering the tax details to generate an invoice. I thought that was a brilliant idea. tested it with a few users. Everybody loved it, so I released it. And then a week later, I realized that, yes, I've sold it for the people that were getting confused, but I've ended up confusing a totally different group of people that expects the tax fields there. So the net effect was negative. then I went back to the original form. so there's lots of these things where people don't necessarily behave the way you think they will. Brian (24:38) Hahaha. Gojko (24:48) Ron Kohavi has a wonderful book about that called Trustworthy Online Experiments. And he has data from Slack, from Microsoft, from Booking .com and... The numbers are depressive. on one hand, the numbers range from 10 to 30, 40 % success rate for people's ideas. And if leading companies like that do things that don't pan out two thirds of the time, then we have to be honest building our products and say, well, maybe this idea is going to work out, maybe not. Brian (25:03) Hahaha. Wow. Gojko (25:30) the more experimental the population is, the more risky that is. think monitoring and capturing weird user behaviors, capturing errors helps you understand that people are getting stuck. as you said, you don't want to follow everybody. There's going to be a lot of noise there. We need to extract signals from the noise. That's what the second step is about, focusing on one specific thing we want to improve. Then, try to remove obstacles and then double -checking that we've actually removed them. That's the four steps. And there's like a shorter version of all the four steps. It's easier to remember. It's listen alert, zooming, rescue them, and then double check at the end. that's again, LZRD. Brian (26:13) That's awesome. Yeah, I love the process and I love the kind of steps there. Are there tools that you recommend for this that are easier to try to determine these things or chase them down or are there tools that you find are more helpful? Gojko (26:32) So there's lots of tools today for things like A -B testing and looking at experiments and things that are very helpful to do this scale. And it's kind of especially useful for the last step. In terms of kind of focusing and things like that, the five stages of growth from the linear analytics are a good tool. Impact mapping is a good tool. Kind of any focusing product management technique that says, well, these are the business goals we're working on now, or these are the kind of user goals we're working on now. out of, know, 50 lizards we found last week, these three lizards seem to be kind of in that area. And for the first step, spotting when people are getting stuck, there's a bunch of tools that are interesting, like session recorders for web products. There's one from Microsoft called Clarity that's free. There's another called Full Story that's quite expensive. There's a couple of open source one, one is packaged within Matomo analytics application. There's a bunch of these other things. Any kind of observability or monitoring tool is also very useful for this because we can spot when people are getting stuck. One of the things I found particularly helpful is logging all user errors. When a user does something to cause an error condition in a product, the product of course tells them like, know, an error happened. But then... logging it and analyzing that information in the back is really critical. for something like that, people sometimes use web analytics tools or any kind of product analytics. I think what's going to be interesting in the next couple of years, and I think if people start doing this more, is we'll see. more like these technical exception analytics tracking tools mixed with this because most of the product analytics are showing people what they expect to see, not what they don't expect to see. And I'll just give you an example of this way. was really helpful. So I've mentioned the screen where people can upload the Word documents. Occasionally people would select weird file types. So they'll select images, they'll select, I don't know, what else. Brian (28:31) Yeah. Gojko (28:49) Sometimes I guess that's a result of, know, a fat finger press or somebody not selecting the right thing. I have a not insignificant percentage of users every day that try to upload Android package files into a text -to -speech reader. Android package files and application files, I don't know what the right way is to read out an Android application. My best guess is people are doing that. as a, you know, these things where you drop a USB in front of an office and somebody kind of mistakenly plugs it in. So maybe they're hoping that I'll know the Android application on my phone just because they've uploaded it. I don't know, but a small percentage of users was trying to upload files that had SRT and VTT extensions, which are subtitle files. And they were not supported, but Brian (29:31) Yeah. Gojko (29:45) I kept getting information that people are uploading those types of files. And then I said, well, this is interesting because it's a text to speech system. People are uploading subtitle files, there's text in, so why don't I just ignore the timestamps and read the text? I can do that. And I started supporting that. And then some people started complaining that, well, the voice is reading it slower than the subtitles. I said, well, yes, because... Brian (30:11) Ha Gojko (30:12) You know, you're uploading subtitles that were read by an actor in a movie. This is a voice that's reading it at their speed. And then we started talking and it turns out that these people were doing it for corporate educational videos where they have a video in English, they need it in French, German, Spanish and all the else, but they don't want to kind of re -edit the video. They just want an alternate audio track. Okay, I mean, I have the timestamps, we can speed up or slow down the audio, it's not a big deal. And we've done that and this was one of the most profitable features ever. Like a very small percentage of the users need it, but those that need it produce hundreds of thousands of audio files because they translate the corporate training videos. And now, you know, we're getting into that numbers game. If I said, you know, there's like 0 .1 % of people are uploading subtitle files. Brian (30:58) Yeah. Gojko (31:07) then it doesn't matter. if we start thinking about, this is potentially interesting use case, it creates growth on its own because then people find you. And I think my product was the first that was actually doing synchronous subtitles. Competitors are doing it now as well. But it opened the massive, massive market for us. And people, you know, I got there by monitoring user errors, by, you know, the fact that somebody uploaded a file that had an unsupported extension. That was our insight. Brian (31:38) Wow, that's really cool. That's a great story. This is fascinating stuff. And it makes me want to dive deeper into the book and read through it again. But I really appreciate you coming on and sharing this with us, Goiko. This is good stuff. Again, the book is called, Lizard Optimization, Unlock Product Growth by Engaging Long Tail Users. And if I'm right, we talked about this a little bit before. We're going to offer a discount to to the listeners, Gojko (32:07) Yes, we will give you a listen as a 50 % discount on the ebook. the ebook is available from Lean Pub. If you get it from the discount URL that I'll give you, then you'll get a 50 % discount immediately. Brian (32:24) Awesome. So we'll put that in our show notes. If you're interested in that, you can find the show notes. That's a great deal, 50 % off the book and it's good stuff. well, I just, I can't thank you enough. Thanks for making time and coming on and talking this through your book. Gojko (32:40) Thank you, it was lovely to chat to you.

Dublin is set to Host Amplify Summit 2024, gathering innovation leaders to discuss breakthroughs and demonstrate that Ireland is setting the trend for sustainability in Europe. A premier event dedicated to fostering product innovation and sustainability, is set to take place on September 26th at the Dublin Royal Convention Centre. A Stellar Lineup of Speakers The summit will feature a exciting lineup of industry leaders, including: Bas van Abel: As the founder of world's leading sustainable mobile phone Fairphone, Bas has been at the forefront of ethical and sustainable consumer electronics. His talk will share insights into the challenges and opportunities of creating sustainable products in a highly competitive market, emphasizing the importance of fair labour practices and transparency in the supply chain. Dr. Robert G. Cooper: A world-renowned expert in new product development, Dr. Cooper will share his personal learnings and insights on "Building Sustainable Products: A Stage-Gate Approach." Bianca Zwart: Growing one of Europe's premiere neobanks (BUNQ). Bianca will share her experience changing minds in traditional banking while building out innovative services for customers in a heavily regulated industry. Joan Mulvihill: Leveraging her background in digitalization and sustainability, Joan will address the role of technology in driving sustainable innovation and her experience in Siemens. Malachy Browne: Based on his work with the New York Times, Malachy explores the intricate world of digital forensics, highlighting how journalists use advanced digital techniques to analyse and verify images and videos from conflict zones and other newsworthy events. Outlining how this rigorous process not only aids in revealing truths but also plays a vital role in influencing public perception and policy by presenting undeniable evidence. Steve Gilsenan: As Guinness's head of Quality, Steve is the founder of the Guinness FutureServe dispense innovation programme, and is the recipient of 5 coveted Red Dot design awards over the past 3 years, including the first ever Red Dot Award for beer dispense equipment and will be sharing his insight into hardware innovations in his industry. Alistair Croll: Author of acclaimed Lean Analytics, Alistair, known for his expertise in business strategy, will offer a masterclass on navigating the complexities of innovation in marketing and analytics. Interactive Sessions and Actionable Insights Beyond engaging keynote addresses, the summit will offer a variety of engaging formats, including: Unique talks and discussions: Explore topics such as "The Power of Visual Forensics - What Innovators can Learn from Journalists" Masterclasses: 'How underdogs subvert the system and turn attention into profitable demand' Roundtable sessions: Engage in deep dive subjects with interactive discussions on topics like "Embracing AI for Product Development." Key Themes and Takeaways Amplify Summit 2024 will delve into critical themes: Front-line Industries: Embracing Multi-sector industries feeding Insight into the application of innovative solutions. Sustainability Throughout the Product Lifecycle: Learn how to integrate sustainable practices into every stage of product development. The Power of Technology for Sustainability: Discover how AI, data analytics, and digital tools can optimise resource utilisation and promote transparency. Scaling Sustainable Practices: Gain insights on strategies to implement sustainable practices and scale their impact for a global market. Alignment with Consumer Values: Learn how to design products that meet consumer needs for sustainability while remaining competitive. Registration and More Information Don't miss this opportunity to connect with industry leaders, gain valuable insights, and network with like-minded professionals. To register and learn more about Amplify Summit 2024, please visit: The website: https://amplifysummit.ie See more stories here. More about Irish Tech News ...

There are so many new GenAI products coming to market that it is hard to believe even a fraction of them will become sustainable businesses. Ben Yoskovitz, Founding Partner of Highline Beta and author of Lean Analytics, joins us to discuss how many of these startups will fail to find a product-market fit. By rushing to get to market they're likely skipping key steps that would typically improve their likelihood of success. We discuss the process his venture studio uses and where he sees opportunities for AI products to deliver more value to consumers.Ben's newsletter: https://www.focusedchaos.co/Design of AI, the podcast for product teamsHosted by Brittany Hobbs & Arpy Dragffy Subscribe to the podcasthttps://www.youtube.com/@DesignofAI This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit designofai.substack.com

"Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster"

Subscribe to my newsletter to learn from the best entrepreneurs and VCs. https://newsletter.prodcircle.com/profileEpisode 14:  This is by far the most interesting episode we have recorded on the show. I had the previlige of sitting down with a great mind of this century, Alistair Croll. Alistair is a serial entrepreneur, event organizer, and bestselling author who works at the intersection of technology and society.After an early career in product management and telecommunications at Eicon, Primary Access, and 3Com, Alistair built web performance pioneer Coradiant and sold it to BMC for $135M. He launched the Year One Labs incubator, chaired O'Reilly's Strata and UBM's Cloud Connect, founded FWD50, and taught at Harvard Business School. He has co-written three books including Lean Analytics, widely considered required reading for startups, and is currently working on Just Evil Enough, the subversive marketing playbook. In this episode, we talked about the important of building purpose driven startups, creating a network that you can rely on, why marketing is more important than your product, how to use venture capital, and how to build dream companies.If you are in entrepreneurial space, this is a mega episode for you. Enjoy :)

We talked about; Antonis' background The pros and cons of working for a startup Useful skills for working at a startup and the Lean way to work How Antonis joined the DataTalks.Club community Suggestions for students joining the MLOps course Antonis contributing to Evidently AI How Antonis started freelancing Getting your first clients on Upwork Pricing your work as a freelancer The process after getting approved by a client Wearing many hats as a freelancer and while working at a startup Other suggestions for getting clients as a freelancer Antonis' thoughts on the Data Engineering course Antonis' resource recommendations Links: Lean Startup by Eric Ries: https://theleanstartup.com/ Lean Analytics: https://leananalyticsbook.com/ Designing Machine Learning Systems by Chip Huyen: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-machine-learning/9781098107956/ Kafka Streaming with python by Khris Jenkins tutorial video: https://youtu.be/jItIQ-UvFI4 Free MLOps course: https://github.com/DataTalksClub/mlops-zoomcamp Join DataTalks.Club: https://datatalks.club/slack.html Our events: https://datatalks.club/events.html

Episode 3: Ben Yoskovitz is an entrepreneur from Canada who has seen immense success as an entrepreneur during his earlier. His first startup was acquired within a few years of working. In his later roles, his company got acquired by Salesforce. He ran an accelerator and led one of the startup to get acquired by Airbnb. Today, he runs Highline beta, a venture studio and venture capital firm that is on a mission to help founders build meaningful products and reach their goals faster. He also co author the Lean Analytics book with his friend Alistair CrollIn this episode, we talked about successes, failures, mistakes he has made, AI and how other technologies are changing the world. We also touched on what makes a product/startup worth investing. Enjoy :)

We have talked in the past about tools for Product Analytics, but we have not yet talked about why analytics are so important for the product manager. It might seem obvious, but it is still a concept that needs more clarification.For exactly that reason, 10 years ago Ben Yoskovitz and Alistair Croll wrote the book “Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster” (O'Reilly), and it is still relevant today, not only to startups entrepreneurs, but to product people.In this episode, Moshe and Matt met with Ben Yoskovitz to hear about the different ways Product Managers use analytics, and what we can learn from Lean Analytics.In the episode we talked about:Taking the theory of Lean Startup to a more actionable place, based on analytics and dataIdentifying the metrics that matter to you - what to track and what to focus on based on the business you are in and the stage you are atWhat makes a good metric? How do I know a number is a good one to look at? What has changed since writing the book?What product managers should learn and focus on?Balancing qualitative and quantitative data and analyticsAnd much more!You can connect with Ben at:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/byosko/ Twitter: @byoskoFocused Chaos: https://www.focusedchaos.co/ Buy the book on Amazon: “Lean Analytics”You can find the podcast's page, and connect with Matt and Moshe on Linkedin: Product for Product Podcast - linkedin.com/company/product-for-product-podcastMatt Green - linkedin.com/in/mattgreenanalytics/Moshe Mikanovsky - linkedin.com/in/mikanovsky/Note: any views mentioned in the podcast are the sole views of our hosts and guests, and do not represent the products mentioned in any way.Please leave us a review and feedback ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

#23: For over two decades Itamar Gilad held senior product management and engineering roles at Google, Microsoft and a number of startups. At Google, Itamar led parts of Gmail and was the head of Gmail's growth team. Axel sits down with Itamar to discuss some of the frameworks he's been crafting through his journey and how they can help fellow Product Managers improve their practice.We specifically dive into how frameworks can help PMs boost their confidence based on evidence and clear communication.Where to find ItamarLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itamargilad/Website: https://itamargilad.com/Where to find AxelLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/axelsooriah/About PanashWe provide training and coaching programs to help product professionals unlock their true potential and become high performers.You can learn more about our programs here: https://www.panash.io/Our blog contains articles and free resources on key topics for product managers and leaders.Check it out here: https://collection.panash.io/Referenced in this episode:The Lean Startup by Eric RiesInspired by Marty CaganEmpowered by Marty Cagan with Chris JonesLean Enterprise by Jez Humble et al.Lean Analytics by Alistair CrollRunning Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works by Ash MauryaValue proposition canvas by StrategyzerAssumption Mapping by David J. BlandItamar's resourcesShow notes and highlights(01:35) Itamar's background(03:32) How does the MUST Framework help(12:42) Biggest traps people fall into when crafting strategy(18:04) Deferring the point of commitment(22:52) GIST: a framework to bridge strategy and execution(35:23) Using frameworks to boost confidence (44:26) Itamar's Treasure Chest───For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, please reach out to podcast@panash.ioMentioned in this episode:Elevate your product careerDo you feel stuck, not knowing how to tackle a problem? Are you looking for a solution to help your team members grow in their craft? Either way, check out...

Google bo v letu 2023 naredil absolutno tranzicijo iz Universal Analyticsa, ki ga nekateri klikamo že v miže, v Google Analytics 4, ki deluje po čisto drugi logiki. Z nami je Maša Crnkovič, vodilna slovenska strokovnjakinja na področju uporabniške izkušnje in analitike. Maša je pojasnila bistvene novosti ter delila številne prakične nasvete za podjetnike in marketinške strokovnjake. Povezave: https://si.linkedin.com/in/masacrnkovic https://twitter.com/crnkovicm Growth Hacking Slovenia: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1870456883232512/about/ Campaign URL Builder: https://ga-dev-tools.web.app/campaign-url-builder/ https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11242841?hl=en#zippy=%2Cin-this-article Bralna priporočila: Web Analytics 2.0: http://www.webanalytics20.com/ Lean Analytics: https://leananalyticsbook.com/ How to Measure Anything: https://www.howtomeasureanything.com/ Simo Ahava's blog: https://www.simoahava.com/

BIO: Alistair Croll is an entrepreneur, author, and conference organizer. His book Lean Analytics has been translated into eight languages and is considered mandatory reading for startup founders. STORY: Alistair needed to raise capital for his startup. He received a series A investment of $20 million and gave up 50% equity in his company. LEARNING: Don't scale prematurely. Capture your market's attention first.   “Risk is a necessary component of progress.”Alistair Croll  Guest profilehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/alistaircroll/ (Alistair Croll) is an entrepreneur, author, and conference organizer. His book https://amzn.to/3upOTWN (Lean Analytics) has been translated into eight languages and is considered mandatory reading for startup founders. He helped create the Data Science and Critical Thinking course at Harvard Business School and founded web performance pioneer Coradiant. He's chaired some of the world's leading tech events, including Strata and Cloud Connect, and is the co-founder of https://fwd50.com/ (Forward50), the world's biggest conference on digital government. He's joining us from Montreal, Canada, where he's hard at work on a new book https://justevilenough.com/ (Just Evil Enough), a still-stealthy mobile startup called Stroll, and launching the 2022 edition of Startupfest, Canada's original startup conference. Worst investment everAlistair started a startup in the business of running websites for people. So instead of having to buy dedicated hardware, web server, firewall, and so on to run your website, the company could have that stuff and let customers use a slice of it. The company got a Series A investment of $20 million. In return, Alistair and his partners gave up half of the company. Alistair didn't anticipate that this trend he'd foreseen was just the start of a much longer trend that led to modern-day cloud computing. Alistair's worst investment ever was receiving funding and giving up 50% equity in the company long before he had adequately understood the trend he was capitalizing on. Lessons learnedDon't scale prematurely. Capture your market's attention first. When pitching an idea, always ask yourself if you can change the behavior of a lucrative target market sustainably. Andrew's takeawaysYour startup is not successful until you can sustainably keep people's attention and focus on what you're doing. Actionable adviceDe-risk the highest and most uncertain thing first. No.1 goal for the next 12 monthsAlistair's goal for the next 12 months is to market his new book https://justevilenough.com/ (Just Evil Enough). Parting words  “We move the world forward by taking risks. So figure out what risks are worth it and then plunge headlong into them and don't pull your punches.”Alistair Croll  [spp-transcript]   Connect with Alistair Crollhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/alistaircroll/ (LinkedIn) https://twitter.com/acroll (Twitter) https://alistaircroll.com/ (Website) https://amzn.to/3upOTWN (Book) Andrew's bookshttps://amzn.to/3qrfHjX (How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market) https://amzn.to/2PDApAo (My Worst Investment Ever) https://amzn.to/3v6ip1Y (9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them) https://amzn.to/3emBO8M (Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming's 14 Points) Andrew's online programshttps://valuationmasterclass.com/ (Valuation Master Class) https://academy.astotz.com/courses/how-to-start-building-your-wealth-investing-in-the-stock-market (How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market) https://academy.astotz.com/courses/finance-made-ridiculously-simple (Finance Made Ridiculously Simple) https://academy.astotz.com/courses/gp (Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence) https://academy.astotz.com/courses/transformyourbusiness (Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming's 14 Points) Connect with Andrew Stotz:https://www.astotz.com/ (astotz.com) https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewstotz/...

Mål är viktiga för att skapa en gemensam riktning för såväl företag som marknadsteam och de är helt avgörande för att kunna arbeta datadrivet. Men alla som varit med och tagit fram mål vet att processen kan vara allt annat än enkel. Jag bjöd därför in Jesper Åström igen för att gå igenom hur man sätter bättre mål och hur man tar fram rätt KPI:er. Att ta fram och definiera mål är svårt. Inte minst marknadsmål. Det som verkar som en enkel övning övergår lätt i diskussion om allt från vad som är ett bra mål till hur man ska mäta det och vilka aktiviteter, kampanjer eller projekt som ska genomföras. Och det gäller i allra högsta grad inom marknadsarbetet. Därför var det så intressant att få prata med Jesper som har lång erfarenhet av att sätta mål och arbeta datadrivet. Och han håller även workshops i just målsättning och att sätta mål. Om gästen Jesper Åström är en digital taktiker och en av Sveriges främsta experter på growth marketing som bland annat har varit med och skapat ett flertal framgångsrika byråer. Och som konsult har han arbetat med företag, varumärken och lanseringar över hela världen. Med start i januari 2022 så går Jesper in som growth marketing lead på solenergibolaget Svea Solar. Vid sidan av uppdrag så delar han även mängder med intressant innehåll kring marknadsföring och har även startat Facebook-gruppen Growth Hackers Sweden. Längre ner hittar du länkar till några av hans projekt och innehåll. Och där hittar du även en länk till avsnitt 49 då vi pratade digital taktik. Om avsnittet Vi startar avsnittet med att Jesper förklarar varför det är så viktigt att sätta mål, både generellt och inom marknadsföring. Jesper berättar sedan vad som kännetecknar ett bra mål och hur man kommer fram till ett sådant. Han går efter det igenom de olika delar ett mål består av och vad det finns för olika system och metoder för att arbeta med mål. Jesper tar oss sedan igenom den process han rekommenderar för att ta fram mål och KPI:er. Och vad som är viktigt när det kommer till mätning och uppföljning. Du får dessutom höra: Varför mål ska vara mänskliga och beskrivna i vanligt språk Vikten av att sätta rätt typ av KPI:er för att lyckas Och varför vi bör sätta färre men mer ambitiösa mål Jesper ger även mängder med exempel och förklarar hur man gör processen med att sätta mål enklare. Samt varför vi borde släppa fokuset på datum och kalendern. Det finns som vanligt länkar till de resurser som nämns i avsnittet här nedan. Jesper har bland annat samlat ihop ett antal resurser kring de olika system för målsättning som vi tog upp i avsnittet. Här nedan finns dessutom en grafik som visar hur mål och KPI:er hänger ihop. Och efter länkarna hittar du självklart också tidsstämplar till olika sektioner i avsnittet. Länkar Jesper Åström på LinkedIn Jespers YouTube-kanal Jespers webbsida Facebook-gruppen Growth Hackers Sweden What is an OKR? Definition and Examples (artikel) What Is A Balanced Scorecard? (artikel) OKRs and Balanced Scorecard: What's the difference? (artikel) Google Ventures workshop: Lean Analytics (video) How to write SMART goals (artikel) Hyper Island Toolbox (resurser) After Action Review* (artikel) * notering från Jesper. “Det här tycker jag är viktigare än själva målen.” Self Determination Theory* (artikel) * Kombinera med AAR. Brian Balfour: Building a Growth Machine / Growth Loops (video) Tidsstämplar [4:40] Jesper inleder med att förklara varför det är så viktigt att sätta bra mål och vad som kännetecknar ett bra sådant. Han förklarar också varför tydliga mål och KPI:er är avgörande för att kunna arbeta datadrivet. [9:18] Vi igenom vad ett bra mål består av och hur mål och KPI:er hänger ihop. Jesper delar även ett antal exempel för att illustrera hur man kan tänka, inte minst för att hitta rätt typ av KPI:er. [14:41] Jesper ger sin syn kring olika system och metoder för att sätta och arbeta med mål.

Tuto Assad es Co-founder y CEO de Vitau y tuve el gusto con el de charlar sobre las lecciones que aprendimos al leer el libro Lean Analytics de Alistair Croll y Benjamin Yoskovitz

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Alistair Croll and Emily Ross, co-authors of the upcoming book Just Evil Enough. We talk about the changing role of marketing and how companies can subvert systems, undermine industry norms, and get platforms to behave in unexpected ways that tilt the scales to generate attention and demand. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.Interview Transcript with Alistair Croll and Emily Ross, Co-authors of Just Evil EnoughBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have some amazing guests. Today we have Alistair Croll and Emily Ross authors of the new book, Just Evil Enough, which is a book about getting noticed in this noisy environment and subversive go-to market strategies. Welcome to the show guys. Alistair Croll: Thanks for having us. Emily Ross: Thanks a million. Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm super excited to have you on this call to give our audience a little bit of a sneak preview of the upcoming book. But first let me give a little bit of background. So, Emily Ross, you are a founder of a tech marketing consultancy company called Ink Vine based in Ireland. So we appreciate you coming across the pond to give us some insights on what's going on. And Alistair and I go back a long time back in the days of Lean Startup. And he's the coauthor of Lean Analytics. We brought him back to Nebraska about six or seven years ago, I guess it was, when I was working with Nmotion to help with our startup teams in that. So thank you for both being on the show. The title of the book, Just Evil Enough. How'd  you come up with that  and what's it all about? Alistair Croll: So I'll tell you a quick story. We ran an accelerator in Montreal called Year One Labs. And one of the companies in Year One Labs was a company called Local Mind. And Local Mind was a platform for asking people questions, asking strangers questions about an area.It was later acquired by Airbnb and Lenny Rachitsky,  the CEO ran supply-side growth there. And he's now the author of one of the most prominent newsletters for startup growth marketing, Lenny's Newsletter. And in the early days they were doing what every startup does, which is building lots of stuff. But because we were very Lean Startup focused, we have them ask what the biggest risk was.And it turns out the biggest risk was that whether people would answer questions from strangers. So they ran a very quick study, which we talk about in Lean Analytics. And they found that 94% of people on Twitter would answer a question from a stranger. But this happened because I had been asking Lenny, are you being evil enough?And they were like, we're not evil. And I said, yeah, but just a little evil, because it turns out that people answer questions, but people on the platform won't ask questions. The real risk is the supply of questions. And so they actually built a system that would ask fake questions of new users. So they get in the habit of asking questions. Now you can debate the means versus the end, but what we have found ever since that time is that almost every startup that's successful has some little dirty secret in their background, where they were able to take advantage of an emerging technology or subvert the way a platform is supposed to work and turn it to their advantage.And so the basic idea behind Just Evil Enough is that almost all the time, the problem isn't whether or not you can build something it's whether anyone will care. So your job should be creating attention you can turn into profitable demand. Emily Ross: I think the subversive word is really, really important because we want to clearly differentiate between nefarious, which is downright evil and subversive, which allows you to think a little bit differently.And it's very hard for people who've been conditioned to think a certain way, to try and think differently.  So the book is about trying to teach people how to think subversively, and to show examples and frameworks in order to do that. And I remember working at a platform years ago and one of the engineers said, right, I'm going to put this button on the website to test if people will click it.And my instant reaction was, but it doesn't go anywhere. That's a terrible idea. They're going to have an awful experience and that's bad for them. And he's like, no, but I don't want to build something unless I know they're going to need it. So I'm just going to put that button there and yeah, I'm going to burn a few thousand clicks and they're gonna have a terrible experience. I don't care. I'll learn something. And he was prepared to be disagreeable in order to learn something different and to save an awful lot of time and money. And it was funny. It was like, okay. I need to think a little bit differently about how we're treating users sometimes. Alistair Croll: Yeah, we did a similar thing at Gradient. We had a reporting feature. Gradient was a startup that I launched in 2001. Eventually got acquired by BMC, their TrueSight product line. And we were about to launch reports in the product. And so we created our reports tab, and the reports tab went to a survey page. It says, we're going to do reports soon, what would you like to see?And people put in their email address and the report they'd like to see. And of course we were building a generic reporting tool. So what we did is we then generated like the top 20 requested reports. Made them defaults and then mailed those people saying we loved your feedback. Thank you so much. We've built the report you're looking for. Forget about the fact that 40 other people ask for the same report. Every one of them felt like they were a unique and special snowflake. And so we were exploiting the asymmetry between what we knew, which was 20 people asked for it and what they knew, which was, Hey, look at this, I'm special. You listened to me. And the customers loved it. Right? Is that evil? Well, it meant that we were able to build the default reports people wanted, which made the product better, but it's a little subversive. Brian Ardinger: Well, I think part of that learning is the fact that I think a lot of people think that they need to build the entire thing, because that's what shows the value. But, you know, again, you have to incrementally de-risk some of these new startup ideas. And so how do you do that with building just enough to get the learning that you need so that you can move it to the next level and build it out if you need to? Alistair Croll: Well, I would say that the problem's not minimum viable product, it's minimum viable attention.Emily Ross: Yeah. And actually, if you think about, and this is the one thing that the book, I suppose, hammers home, is that getting your go-to market strategy right, is as important, if not more important than getting your product right. Because if you can't capture attention and turn it into profitable demand, then no one's going to know about your product. And it's all about various different approaches that you can use to figure out how to do that. And  asymmetry being just one of about 10, I think that we cover. Brian Ardinger: So, is it a form of customer discovery almost so rather than the traditional customer discovery interviews there, you're looking for different ways to engage with a marketplace, engage with a customer to get that understanding of what their demand is and where they want to go from there?Emily Ross: Well, it's really interesting. Some of the examples in the book are not business examples. There's a lot of historical stuff in there, right back from Machiavelli,  all the way through to The Godfather. There's businesses, oh, tell the Genghis Khan story. I love that one. Alistair Croll: So I mean, the idea behind a lot of this is that if you know something to be true, that other people discount, you can take advantage of that. And there are many times where people knew they could do something better, but didn't Genghis Kahn, for example, knew that women could be very effective rulers. This was something that was not widely held. And so he would conquer a city, marry one of his many, many daughters off to the leader of that city. Send that leader off to war, he'd promptly get killed. Now you have a blood relative in charge of that city. Was that evil? Well, Genghis Khan did a lot of nasty things, but he did have a decent amount of respect for women's ability to run cities, which was something nobody else was factoring in. And this was an unfair advantage. Right. And I think, I mean, we're getting a little ahead of it. One of the things that Emily talks about a lot, is the idea that you need to know the norms of your system in order to subvert them. So do you want to talk a little about the water stuff? Emily? Emily Ross: Yeah so normative versus formative is like super interesting. So there's a story of by two fish and they're swimming along, and a much older fish is swimming the opposite direction. And this is from... Alistair Croll: it's a commencement address, right?Emily Ross: That's it, the older fish says, Oh how's the water? And the fish swim on a little bit and they turned to each other and go, what the hell is water? So, you have to be able to recognize the fact that you're swimming in the medium. And the best way to do that is to use external viewpoints to help recognize what you're swimming in or downing  in.I also use a log jam metaphor, which works as well. And this is a one I use all the time for teaching for problem solving, but it's really, really applicable as well too, to recognizing the difference between normative and formative. So when these to say a logs down the river, to ship them to the log yard, And they would occasionally get tangled up and a team of river pigs used to have to surround the problem really quickly because it's obviously getting worse and worse all the time, and figure out which was the one key log that you could extract to unlock the whole problem.And the only way they could do it really, really well, was through diversity of thought, opinion, and perspective. By surrounding the problem, by sharing ideas, by looking at it from lots of different perspectives. And that's why diversity in your teams, that's why diversity of perspectives is so important so that you can actually recognize what you're swimming in, whether it's water or something, a little bit stinkier. And also getting the sense of looking at it from outside, what you're used to. So ideas from different verticals, from different walks of life. That's going to help you think subversively. Alistair Croll: And that's kind of the supervillain stuff. I mean, Brian, I'll give you an example, that's a concrete example from when I came to visit you .One of your startups was making a rotary sprinkler solution.So to recap, rotary sprinklers, when they're lateral to a strong wind, get blown over and this costs a lot of money to fix. And so they built a thing that could measure the weather and the incoming winds and rotate the sprinkler downwind kind of like a wind sock, so it wouldn't fall over. And they're having a hard time selling. And what the startup revealed to me at the time when we were meeting, was that there's this weird existing system between farmers, farm subsidies, insurance, salespeople, and the makers of those sprinklers.They don't really mind when it gets knocked over because everyone makes some money and then they use that money to go on a fishing trip. If you don't know that you're in that water, all your efforts to sell are going to fail. You've got to recognize that and then go, huh? Maybe this is something I can sell through the maker of the sprinklers, or like maybe I can, you can subvert that system.Maybe you have to create an awareness campaign that farm subsidies being wasted and they could be spent on something else. But if you don't know that strategy, you can't subvert it. And that word subvert just means find another version. By definition, the hardest problems we face are the ones for which we don't have an obvious solution, because the normal approaches don't work.Which means you've got to find an unusual approach and that's normally called hacking, right? Hacking is getting something to work in a way it wasn't intended. Whether you're using a Pringle can to focus wifi signals, or you're getting a computer system to throw an error, so you can own a system. The problem with hacking is that in startups, hacking has a horrible polar reputation. Growth hacking is a bag of cheap tricks.Brian Ardinger: Talk about some of the examples in the book that maybe some people have heard of or can get a visual around. I know you've mentioned in past talks and that I've seen around this is like things like Peloton or Burger King.  Can you give examples from that? Emily Ross: I would quite like to talk about one of the ones that I had the hardest time with is about being disagreeable. And we talked about it slightly there in terms of doing things that you wouldn't necessarily think of as being quite right. But as a woman, I have been raised to be polite, to be agreeable. And actually, if you look at some of the most innovative, interesting entrepreneurs in history, quite a lot of them have been profoundly disagreeable.They've been prepared to be unliked or unloved. And this is something, a behavior that you can adopt or think about as a means to finding new ideas, or it means of finding new ways of doing things. One of the examples that we talked sports a little bit earlier, but Wilt Chamberlain was arguably one of the best basketball players of all time. He has on more than one occasion scored over a hundred points in a single game. But he had a problem. He couldn't shoot free throws to save his life. Back in college, he had a really high score, but over his career, it went down and down and down and he had a career low of like, I think 26% success rate.He was a star player. He got fouled a lot. So this was a really big problem for him. So he went to see Rick Barry. Rick Barry was the guy who could not miss. He actually had a career average of 89.3% and he got better and better as his career progressed in the last two years of his career, he had a 94% success rate from free throws. But he actually threw in a really interesting way. He threw underhand, which is actually kind of a cool word for the, Just Evil Enough book, because he shot underhand. But he was the best at shooting. But this was called the Granny Style. This is, you know, if you throw like a girl, you throw under hand. He didn't care. His father had drummed it into him from a very young age, how to shoot underhand, overhand, underhand, overhand, and he could just nail it every single time.So Chamberlain went to see Barry learned to shoot underhand and his performance doubled. He went from a career low, to a career high, in that same game where he scored a hundred points. So it turns out it's a much better approach. However, Chamberlain didn't have the guts to keep shooting underhand because he cared too much about what people thought. His career best was 61% from the line in 1961, he sank 28 of 32 free throws against the New York Knicks.So after a while, though, he reverted to shooting the way he knew, and his percentages  plunged. And he admitted that he felt like a sissy. He worried too much about what other people thought. And unlike Barry who was rational, Chamberlain was being agreeable and wrong. Barry meanwhile said he could be as selfish as he wanted to without hurting his team. So being a little bit disagreeable or asking yourself what you're prepared to do is a really good first start. Alistair Croll: Just to chime in quickly, we've all heard of growth hacking right? Growth hacking is these little tricks that get people to click a button or move down a funnel or whatever. The problem with any of these known tricks is that they're known.  Andrew Chen talks about the law of shitty click-through rates, which is simply the idea that as you find a vulnerability, if you will, a way to change the market, it becomes widely known immediately.So the first click-through ad on Hot Wired had an average of 44% click-through rate. Some people say it was as high as 70% for a banner ad. What's that at now? Emily? Brian Ardinger: Well, industry averages will tell you, or they'll tell you it's 0.1%. But in my opinion, it's closer to 0.02%, if you're lucky. Alistair Croll: So that's a huge decline. Same thing happened with email and so on. And so there are these known hacks that are the sort of marketing equivalent of a script kitty, who's running an attack on WordPress. And if you haven't patched your site, you'll be selling Viagra off your website. What you should be doing is trying to find the marketing equivalent of a zero day exploit.So in security a zero day, is an attack that nobody knows about yet. And they're incredibly valuable. Two of them were used to retard the Iranian nuclear program and damaged centrifuges. The marketing equivalent of a zero day exploit, we call this zero day marketing, is finding a new way to get a platform to behave in an unintended manner, with which you can create attention you can turn into profitable demand. And there's some amazing examples of like Farmville, for example. When Farmville's app would send you a message saying, Hey, Brian, Alistair's cows need some grain. And you'd click on it. Now you're a user. Well, they got to 30 million users before Facebook went, Whoa, we maybe don't want apps posting to people's friend feeds.There are so many examples of this, and we can tell you those examples. But the point is you can't use those examples because they've already been done. Right? What you have to do is devote much more of your time to inventing your own zero day marketing exploits. Brian Ardinger: So from that perspective, is it a series of experiments that you just have to run? You, you come up with some ideas and you run them like that, or is this, talk me through the process of how you get better at it? Emily Ross: One of the examples that I like to share, if you see it often enough, you begin to understand how you can apply the thinking. It's a model and you just try and apply it to your own environment. So if we take the information asymmetry, and example, the idea of subverting, one thing for another. Or a bait and switch. The idea of you're selling one thing, but actually getting another and Tupperware parties did this, you know, you think you're going for dinner and you end up getting guilt ridden into buying a load of plastic.But when I was working in a comparison platform, we subverted the PR channel for the generation of white hat backlinks. So PR is generally around building brand and brand awareness. But one of the side effects of PR was the generation of backlinks. So this is back in like maybe 2013. So what we did was we mined data. We attached big data trends to celebrities, pushed out, press releases to high value domains, and pretty much one in five hit would generate a backlink. When we started. We had about 1400 high quality backlinks. And we were generating about 60,000 non-brand organic visits to site per day. And after three years of pushing out two releases a month, month in, month out, we had over four and a half thousand unique domain backlinks and almost 200,000 non-brand organic visits per day.And this was a platform that turned traffic into money. I won't tell you how, but what we did for example, was we mined hair transplant trends and prices. And one example of the many, many crazy pushes we did was the Jude Law index of baldness. So here's a scale up from Colin Farrell all the way up to Dr. Evil,  of how bald are you? And you find yourself on the index and you see, Oh, this is how much it would cost for me to have hair transplants. It was a price comparison website for private health clinics. And this was a fun, interesting way to attract attention and turn it into traffic to the sites. But actually it wasn't really about traffic. It was always about the backlinks. So one in five hits generate a backlink, but again, it was channel burnout. It was a zero day exploit because you know, over the course of the three years, the number of backlinks that were being generated, went from maybe one in five to one in 10, because the platforms themselves started to recognize the value that they were accidentally giving away.So naturally you get published in a paper. If there's an online version of it, they print it online and they put a backlink out. It was a side effect of the real, a pure PR. And channel burn happened, those backlinks are no longer as readily available as they were. But it worked for about three years, four years. It was a fun time. Brian Ardinger:  You have to have a continuous funnel  yourself of new things that you need to explore it. Emily Ross: Exactly.  Exactly. So that was a, we had a good run, but it's about thinking about, well, what is the channel? What is the platform? So PR was the channel and we used it in a way. It wasn't intended to be used for our benefits. And so what are your channels? How can you use them differently? And that's a really great question to ask of yourself, no matter what you're doing. Alistair Croll: One of the things we often do is. What has changed in a technology platform. So for example, Travis Kalanick has this new startup Cloud Kitchens. What has changed in restaurants? Well, first of all, there's a huge abundance of restaurants that I could order from. Far more than I would know about. So I'm already overwhelmed with selection when I go to order food, because we're all at home, in a pandemic, ordering food. And second of all, The fact that the storefront is virtual, it means one kitchen can have many restaurant front ends. And so Cloud Kitchens will set you up with brands and their brands have games like Fucking Good Pizza, My Pasta, Dirty Little Vegan Bitch, Don't Grill My Cheese. None of these tell you about food, but when you're overwhelmed, and you have that sort of paradox of choice, you go, no, I'll just order it from that one. That sounds fine. Right? That's only possible because that brand is part of an experiment. You're ordering from an experiment. And they're constantly testing, which ones get more attention and then the restaurant can deliver all of those things that might be the same kitchen. And so Cloud Kitchens has taken advantage of an exploit within the traditional model of food ordering. So it's looking at, you know, what technology changes or combinations of technology, makes something possible that wasn't possible before that you can then subvert to your ends. Brian Ardinger: How do you go from not just creating a gimmick or how do you, I guess also approach being wrong, like trying these things and, and being wrong?Emily Ross: Growth hacking is gimmicks. Growth Hacking is doing something that maybe it's a publicity stunt or, I mean, one of the examples that we use in the book is pairing two things unexpectedly together. That's a great way to draw attention and Heineken did this really well in the UK just last week, where they put out a mobile hairdressing units and bar, so you could get a free haircut and a pint together.So this generated publicity and it's nice, but it's gimmicky, right? Is that really going to move their needle? You know, for the year? Possibly not. It's a nice story. So, but if you look at governments have been doing this for years and they've done it so well, there's a really good example in the book, which I won't go into now about how the government shamed people into stopping spitting in the twenties, as they tried to fight TB. Instead of just saying it's bad to spit, they actually made people feel bad, and socially, and vulgar  by spitting because before that it was perfectly normal.And if you look at the Chinese government, they use Fapiao.  Fapiao  are receipts. And they use Fapiao  as a lottery to fight corruption. So this is really interesting. In China, corruption can be rampant. Merchants will give their customers a discount, if the customer doesn't ask for a receipt.So the merchant doesn't have to report the income and like just pockets to the savings. The government used an incentive to combat this called Fapiao, which is a receipt  from the merchant. And there's a couple of hacks in here that are super clever. So the merchants have to buy the receipts beforehand and then hand them out to customers in return for payment.So the first one is the merchant has to pay tax before the transaction. That's really smart. And then customers demand their Fapiao, because there's a scratch and win lottery element. And then the government runs the lottery and customers can scratch off the panel to see if they've won anything. And so the second hack there is create demand for a receipt by making it a game.And then of course the government can also adjust the prize amount of each lottery to create just the right amount of incentive. So they're literally able to alter the rewards of the game to like tilt the Nash equilibrium, which is just like super smart. So you can do this at a macro level and absolutely get away with it.Alistair Croll: I want to just make sure we address your question about gimmicks. One of the big differences between a Zero Day Exploit and traditional Growth Hacking is that it's not known. But another is that it is intrinsic to your business model. The haircuts aren't intrinsic to Heineken's beer, but when Dropbox launched, they were the first to pioneer this, both of us get something. I invite you, we both get storage. That's built into the product, right. That's intrinsic to the system itself. And I think what it means is that you're factoring in Zero Day Exploits, marketing exploits, to your business model and your product roadmap. Not just to your marketing campaigns. I mean, Genghis Khan's  a good example, right?It wasn't just a tactic. It was a fundamental change in how he thought that societies could be ruled. So the real lesson here is, I'll give you one more example. There's a company that makes software called Energage  and they make workplace surveys. So they would sell to an enterprise and the enterprise would survey their employees and do  360 stuff. And so on. But the way they go to market is they launched this thing called the top workplaces project in concert with the Washington Post, the Denver Post, the Dallas Morning News and so on. And they run this survey and they say to these newspapers, Hey everybody, here's the survey. We'll take care of it.So now you go do it. And like, Whoa, isn't this great. My company is one of the best workplaces. I'll buy an ad in the newspaper. Everything's wonderful. And then Energage can go back and go, Hey, congratulations on being the third best workplace in Nebraska. Too bad about the other results. And you go what other results? Well, you know, we got more data than that, would you like to see it? Okay. And now you have a new customer, right? It's intrinsic to the business model, right. Rather than just being a little trick or hack. Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting point. And it also goes to the point where you see a lot of these examples in startups, because you can build it early on into the business model and that. How does this play out for a large existing company that wants to try to use some of these tactics?Emily Ross: So big companies really need to think about reframing and they also need to give themselves permission to think in ways they're not used to. One of the exercises I like to recommend is called a pre-mortem. And you basically give them permission to imagine the worst possible outcome. You invite them to invent the worst, worst, worst thing that could possibly happen and then work backwards from there.And it's amazing what happens in an environment like that, because that group think is real. That tribal behaviors of wanting to be agreeable and wanting everyone to pull together is very much a systematic thing that you see in large organizations. So giving them permission to think disagreeably.  Giving them methods to reframe where they are, what they do. These are all great frameworks for them to try and think subversively. Alistair Croll: First of all, I think that it's really important. I mean, I would consider a marketing department, have a Red Team. Have a second group, hmm, that has the same product and resources, but their job is to put the first group out of business. What do you do? Right. That's just hypothetical. You're going to think better. We Red Team on security. We Red Team on PR. Why don't we read team on go-to-market strategies.  And the second thing is, if you look at great brands that changed how people discussed a product or a service, they found a frame of reference that favored them. For decades we used to talk about electric cars. We would talk about sustainability and range. Pretty boring stuff, right? Lots of hippies sitting around going let's save the planet and look at my Prius. Elon Musk put one of them on a race track against supercar and beat it. And all of a sudden the conversation on electric cars was performance. He'd reframed the discussion about electric vehicles to performance, right?When Gmail first launched, your inbox on Hotmail or Yahoo mail had 10 mgs. That's like one photo, right? We don't remember that. My daughter doesn't believe this. When Gmail came along, Google knew that they did not have strength in folders and archiving and hierarchy and export, but they were good at with search and storage.So they said, Hey, email's not about your ability to manage your folders and your inbox and organization and management. It's about abundance storage. And they reinforced that so much that they actually had a counter showing you how much storage you get. Salesforce, when it first launched, was a web based CRM, but web-based CRMs had very few features compared to Siebel and Vantive and Clarify, companies that you don't see anymore.So they said no CRM is about not needing IT. In fact, their logo was no software. They had us the word software with a slash through it, despite the fact that they own their own programming language called Apex. Right? And so each of these companies found a way to reframe things, even like Listerine. Listerine was this clinical health thing. And then along comes scope and says, Hey, you know what? Mouthwash is actually about being attractive and sexy, not about clinical health. One action that a lot of big brands should take is to step back and say, what is a new frame that favors us and disadvantages our competition. And then what is it about that frame of reference that we can do to prove it that will then allow the customer to find a different way of valuing the product?Emily Ross: I would also chime in there and talk about generally large marketing teams will have, they'll have done their marketing degrees and their MBAs or masters on they'll turn out the four P's from, you know, the 1960s or the seven P's of service. And like there's too much P. Just stop peeing. Guys just stopped doing it.Right. Chuck, all of that in the bin and start thinking about creating attention. And it's as simple and as complicated as that. We talk about human motivation and Alistair  I think coined laid, made, paid, afraid. I tidy that up a bit to the piratey AARG. Which is appeal, authority, risk, and greed. So think about your customers. Think about your competitors. Think about the marketplace through the lens of human behavior and whether you're selling radiator bits or cars or Cola, people have all those very basic triggers. They want to be liked that's appeal. They want power that's authority. They want to feel safe. That's the risk lens.And then greed, you know, people want the things that they want. So. We're just human meat bags, right? We're just walking bags of meat with emotions. We have very simple motivations at the end of the day. And in a B2B setting for a big organization, the AARG framework is a really useful function. Like, so throw out the P. Think about AARG.And if you're trying to convince people to act, you need to appeal to base emotions more than you do plain reason, because most people really aren't very rational. There's also really a good examples of the seven deadly sins. If you look at the big, big enterprises, I think Chris Pack said this on Twitter.I thought it was really, really good. Uber and Amazon are slough. Instagram and Tik Tok are pride. Door Dash is gluttony. Tinder is lust. Pinterest is envy. Twitter is rath. And Bitcoin is greed. So think about the fundamentals. Just think about the basics. We haven't changed all that much. Alistair Croll: But I think the biggest thing here is that big brands haven't realized that the biggest risk they face is that someone else will subvert attention that they could otherwise be getting and turned into their profitable demand. And so if you don't do that, you're going to get eaten alive. If we can get the world to realize that the biggest risk is not whether you will build something, but whether anyone will care, we've already given people a huge headstart.Brian Ardinger: Well, and the fact that the world is changing so fast on the fact that you can go from company like Airbnb in 12 years to being, you know, one of the most recognizable brands, you know, overnight effectively from what used to be to build a business. New technologies, new marketplaces, new access to talent. All of that is just accelerating the opportunities to be disrupted. Alistair Croll: We used to have a new platform come along. You know, we had writing that took a few thousand years. Then we got to radio. It took a few hundred years. And then we got to television that took a decade, the rate of introduction of new platforms. And therefore, if you're thinking like a hacker new attack surfaces, Is incredible, right? The Cloud Kitchens example happened because of the pandemic and the rise of Uber Eats and Door Dash, and so on. The pace at which new exploit opportunities appear is very, very fast. And as a result, there are far more opportunities to subvert the status quo or the norms of your industry with one of these new platforms.So we're trying to get people to be much more opportunistic. And part of what we do, like I said I can't tell you do this thing, because if I tell you, then it's already been done. What we can do is we can say, here are some ways to think about it. You know, is there an innovation that happens? Can you reframe things? Can you do a substitution where people think they're getting one thing and they're actually getting another. Can you appeal to the foibles of human psychology? Emily Ross: Don't be afraid to be disagreeable. Alistair Croll: It's weird because in the past I've written books that are very technical. There is a right answer. And Emily's written lots of articles on like how to do stuff. This is a more subjective thing and candidly more uncomfortable for us as writers, because we want to make sure that there are applicable lessons, but it's almost like, you know, teaching someone Zen. I can tell you what it is, but you're going to have to go sit on a rock and figure it out for yourself.But once you start thinking this way, everything becomes a subversive opportunity. And once you have that subversive lens, you're not being evil, you're just being just evil enough. Opportunities are everywhere. Emily Ross: And actually, if you think about it, just coming back to your very first question, which is a nice cyclicity.  The title of the book is exactly what we set out to do, which is we got your attention and we're turning it into demand. So the book title is a really, really simple and effective way to showcase the thinking. And I think if you take one thing away from it, it's change what you spend your time on. So building a subversive go-to market strategy is just as important as thinking about your product. And if you get the balance, right, you're going to be unstoppable. Brian Ardinger: Well, and you've also from the book perspective, the book's not out yet, but you're doing things to grab attention differently than a lot of, I mean, I get pitched every other day by a book author trying to get their book noticed and that. But I know that you've been doing some things as far as live online course that's leading up to the book. And you have a interesting little survey. I don't, if we got to talking about any of the things that you're doing from a attention perspective to, about the book. Emily Ross: Well one of the things I love, this was so much fun, is that you can't just order the book. You can't just pre-order it. You have to take a quiz so that we can decide if you're evil enough. So you take the quiz and if you're not evil enough, we think, you know, you're not going to be able to handle the book. And if you're too evil, then this book could just perhaps be too powerful. So we have gamified the experience of the pre-order function, which was a lot of fun. And we've done a ton of tons of things, just mostly because we'd like to mess around, but that's just one of the things we've done so far. Alistair Croll: It's also great that Emily has like a whole team of web developers that stand up.  Emily's business is actually, she's like the SWAT team or the MI6 for some very advanced tech brands, who can't really explain what they do well. And Emily figures out how to do that. So she has a team of people to build stuff. So a good example of that is we wanted to do a survey to see whether people would take our cohort based course, which we're going to be running with Maven, the founders of  Alt MBA and UDemy,   set up this new, online cohort based course program. But we wanted to get people to take the survey. So we told them one lucky winner will get a free workshop or talk from us for their organization, which is usually something we charged a lot of money for. But we also wanted to make sure they shared the survey, which is a paradox because I want the greatest odds of winning. So I'm not going to tell my friends, right?So we made two surveys. One was Team Orange, one was Team Black. And we say, we'll choose the winner from the survey that has the most responses. That's a bit subversive. Right. And we found some funny things about people getting kind of tribal and like I'm Team Black and so on. We even did things to tweak the survey questions a little bit between the two.So we ran like six or seven social experiments in the survey. But would you buy a book from people who weren't thinking subversively? I mean, I wouldn't buy a book on subversiveness for someone who went through normal tactics. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Absolutely. Well, I appreciate you both coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share some of this subversiveness and hopefully get more folks to be Just Evil Enough. People want to find out more about yourself or the book itself, what's the best way to do that. Emily Ross: Just Evil Enough.com and I'll actually, I landed Alistair in it on a talk we did last week because we were live Tweeting. They wouldn't let us take live questions. So we just got everyone to jump on Twitter and ask us questions there.And I promised everyone lives that if they hashtag Just Evil Enough that Alistair would read out whatever they wrote. And they all said smart, intelligent things. And I was like, I can't believe none of you are like trying to flog a course or a book or promote something. Like he will have to say anything you like. So people should...Alistair Croll: I think one guy had me mention his podcast, but there's a good example where like, Oh, you think you're getting free promotion in this thing we're recording, but you're actually following the Just Evil Enough account. Emily Ross: But yes, Just Evil Enough.com is where you can take the quiz. You can hear about the cohort class. You can, pre-order the book and there's an Evil Enough Twitter account too. You can check that out. Brian Ardinger: Well Emily, it was great to meet you for the first time here and Alistair. Always good to catch up with what's going on in your world. So appreciate you both for being on here and looking forward to the conversation in the future.Alistair Croll: Thanks so much for having us. Emily Ross: Thanks Brian.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. 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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Alistair Croll and Emily Ross, co-authors of the upcoming book Just Evil Enough. We talk about the changing role of marketing and how companies can subvert systems, undermine industry norms, and get platforms to behave in unexpected ways that tilt the scales to generate attention and demand. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.Interview Transcript with Alistair Croll and Emily Ross, Co-authors of Just Evil EnoughBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have some amazing guests. Today we have Alistair Croll and Emily Ross authors of the new book, Just Evil Enough, which is a book about getting noticed in this noisy environment and subversive go-to market strategies. Welcome to the show guys. Alistair Croll: Thanks for having us. Emily Ross: Thanks a million. Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm super excited to have you on this call to give our audience a little bit of a sneak preview of the upcoming book. But first let me give a little bit of background. So, Emily Ross, you are a founder of a tech marketing consultancy company called Ink Vine based in Ireland. So we appreciate you coming across the pond to give us some insights on what's going on. And Alistair and I go back a long time back in the days of Lean Startup. And he's the coauthor of Lean Analytics. We brought him back to Nebraska about six or seven years ago, I guess it was, when I was working with Nmotion to help with our startup teams in that. So thank you for both being on the show. The title of the book, Just Evil Enough. How'd  you come up with that  and what's it all about? Alistair Croll: So I'll tell you a quick story. We ran an accelerator in Montreal called Year One Labs. And one of the companies in Year One Labs was a company called Local Mind. And Local Mind was a platform for asking people questions, asking strangers questions about an area.It was later acquired by Airbnb and Lenny Rachitsky,  the CEO ran supply-side growth there. And he's now the author of one of the most prominent newsletters for startup growth marketing, Lenny's Newsletter. And in the early days they were doing what every startup does, which is building lots of stuff. But because we were very Lean Startup focused, we have them ask what the biggest risk was.And it turns out the biggest risk was that whether people would answer questions from strangers. So they ran a very quick study, which we talk about in Lean Analytics. And they found that 94% of people on Twitter would answer a question from a stranger. But this happened because I had been asking Lenny, are you being evil enough?And they were like, we're not evil. And I said, yeah, but just a little evil, because it turns out that people answer questions, but people on the platform won't ask questions. The real risk is the supply of questions. And so they actually built a system that would ask fake questions of new users. So they get in the habit of asking questions. Now you can debate the means versus the end, but what we have found ever since that time is that almost every startup that's successful has some little dirty secret in their background, where they were able to take advantage of an emerging technology or subvert the way a platform is supposed to work and turn it to their advantage.And so the basic idea behind Just Evil Enough is that almost all the time, the problem isn't whether or not you can build something it's whether anyone will care. So your job should be creating attention you can turn into profitable demand. Emily Ross: I think the subversive word is really, really important because we want to clearly differentiate between nefarious, which is downright evil and subversive, which allows you to think a little bit differently.And it's very hard for people who've been conditioned to think a certain way, to try and think differently.  So the book is about trying to teach people how to think subversively, and to show examples and frameworks in order to do that. And I remember working at a platform years ago and one of the engineers said, right, I'm going to put this button on the website to test if people will click it.And my instant reaction was, but it doesn't go anywhere. That's a terrible idea. They're going to have an awful experience and that's bad for them. And he's like, no, but I don't want to build something unless I know they're going to need it. So I'm just going to put that button there and yeah, I'm going to burn a few thousand clicks and they're gonna have a terrible experience. I don't care. I'll learn something. And he was prepared to be disagreeable in order to learn something different and to save an awful lot of time and money. And it was funny. It was like, okay. I need to think a little bit differently about how we're treating users sometimes. Alistair Croll: Yeah, we did a similar thing at Gradient. We had a reporting feature. Gradient was a startup that I launched in 2001. Eventually got acquired by BMC, their TrueSight product line. And we were about to launch reports in the product. And so we created our reports tab, and the reports tab went to a survey page. It says, we're going to do reports soon, what would you like to see?And people put in their email address and the report they'd like to see. And of course we were building a generic reporting tool. So what we did is we then generated like the top 20 requested reports. Made them defaults and then mailed those people saying we loved your feedback. Thank you so much. We've built the report you're looking for. Forget about the fact that 40 other people ask for the same report. Every one of them felt like they were a unique and special snowflake. And so we were exploiting the asymmetry between what we knew, which was 20 people asked for it and what they knew, which was, Hey, look at this, I'm special. You listened to me. And the customers loved it. Right? Is that evil? Well, it meant that we were able to build the default reports people wanted, which made the product better, but it's a little subversive. Brian Ardinger: Well, I think part of that learning is the fact that I think a lot of people think that they need to build the entire thing, because that's what shows the value. But, you know, again, you have to incrementally de-risk some of these new startup ideas. And so how do you do that with building just enough to get the learning that you need so that you can move it to the next level and build it out if you need to? Alistair Croll: Well, I would say that the problem's not minimum viable product, it's minimum viable attention.Emily Ross: Yeah. And actually, if you think about, and this is the one thing that the book, I suppose, hammers home, is that getting your go-to market strategy right, is as important, if not more important than getting your product right. Because if you can't capture attention and turn it into profitable demand, then no one's going to know about your product. And it's all about various different approaches that you can use to figure out how to do that. And  asymmetry being just one of about 10, I think that we cover. Brian Ardinger: So, is it a form of customer discovery almost so rather than the traditional customer discovery interviews there, you're looking for different ways to engage with a marketplace, engage with a customer to get that understanding of what their demand is and where they want to go from there?Emily Ross: Well, it's really interesting. Some of the examples in the book are not business examples. There's a lot of historical stuff in there, right back from Machiavelli,  all the way through to The Godfather. There's businesses, oh, tell the Genghis Khan story. I love that one. Alistair Croll: So I mean, the idea behind a lot of this is that if you know something to be true, that other people discount, you can take advantage of that. And there are many times where people knew they could do something better, but didn't Genghis Kahn, for example, knew that women could be very effective rulers. This was something that was not widely held. And so he would conquer a city, marry one of his many, many daughters off to the leader of that city. Send that leader off to war, he'd promptly get killed. Now you have a blood relative in charge of that city. Was that evil? Well, Genghis Khan did a lot of nasty things, but he did have a decent amount of respect for women's ability to run cities, which was something nobody else was factoring in. And this was an unfair advantage. Right. And I think, I mean, we're getting a little ahead of it. One of the things that Emily talks about a lot, is the idea that you need to know the norms of your system in order to subvert them. So do you want to talk a little about the water stuff? Emily? Emily Ross: Yeah so normative versus formative is like super interesting. So there's a story of by two fish and they're swimming along, and a much older fish is swimming the opposite direction. And this is from... Alistair Croll: it's a commencement address, right?Emily Ross: That's it, the older fish says, Oh how's the water? And the fish swim on a little bit and they turned to each other and go, what the hell is water? So, you have to be able to recognize the fact that you're swimming in the medium. And the best way to do that is to use external viewpoints to help recognize what you're swimming in or downing  in.I also use a log jam metaphor, which works as well. And this is a one I use all the time for teaching for problem solving, but it's really, really applicable as well too, to recognizing the difference between normative and formative. So when these to say a logs down the river, to ship them to the log yard, And they would occasionally get tangled up and a team of river pigs used to have to surround the problem really quickly because it's obviously getting worse and worse all the time, and figure out which was the one key log that you could extract to unlock the whole problem.And the only way they could do it really, really well, was through diversity of thought, opinion, and perspective. By surrounding the problem, by sharing ideas, by looking at it from lots of different perspectives. And that's why diversity in your teams, that's why diversity of perspectives is so important so that you can actually recognize what you're swimming in, whether it's water or something, a little bit stinkier. And also getting the sense of looking at it from outside, what you're used to. So ideas from different verticals, from different walks of life. That's going to help you think subversively. Alistair Croll: And that's kind of the supervillain stuff. I mean, Brian, I'll give you an example, that's a concrete example from when I came to visit you .One of your startups was making a rotary sprinkler solution.So to recap, rotary sprinklers, when they're lateral to a strong wind, get blown over and this costs a lot of money to fix. And so they built a thing that could measure the weather and the incoming winds and rotate the sprinkler downwind kind of like a wind sock, so it wouldn't fall over. And they're having a hard time selling. And what the startup revealed to me at the time when we were meeting, was that there's this weird existing system between farmers, farm subsidies, insurance, salespeople, and the makers of those sprinklers.They don't really mind when it gets knocked over because everyone makes some money and then they use that money to go on a fishing trip. If you don't know that you're in that water, all your efforts to sell are going to fail. You've got to recognize that and then go, huh? Maybe this is something I can sell through the maker of the sprinklers, or like maybe I can, you can subvert that system.Maybe you have to create an awareness campaign that farm subsidies being wasted and they could be spent on something else. But if you don't know that strategy, you can't subvert it. And that word subvert just means find another version. By definition, the hardest problems we face are the ones for which we don't have an obvious solution, because the normal approaches don't work.Which means you've got to find an unusual approach and that's normally called hacking, right? Hacking is getting something to work in a way it wasn't intended. Whether you're using a Pringle can to focus wifi signals, or you're getting a computer system to throw an error, so you can own a system. The problem with hacking is that in startups, hacking has a horrible polar reputation. Growth hacking is a bag of cheap tricks.Brian Ardinger: Talk about some of the examples in the book that maybe some people have heard of or can get a visual around. I know you've mentioned in past talks and that I've seen around this is like things like Peloton or Burger King.  Can you give examples from that? Emily Ross: I would quite like to talk about one of the ones that I had the hardest time with is about being disagreeable. And we talked about it slightly there in terms of doing things that you wouldn't necessarily think of as being quite right. But as a woman, I have been raised to be polite, to be agreeable. And actually, if you look at some of the most innovative, interesting entrepreneurs in history, quite a lot of them have been profoundly disagreeable.They've been prepared to be unliked or unloved. And this is something, a behavior that you can adopt or think about as a means to finding new ideas, or it means of finding new ways of doing things. One of the examples that we talked sports a little bit earlier, but Wilt Chamberlain was arguably one of the best basketball players of all time. He has on more than one occasion scored over a hundred points in a single game. But he had a problem. He couldn't shoot free throws to save his life. Back in college, he had a really high score, but over his career, it went down and down and down and he had a career low of like, I think 26% success rate.He was a star player. He got fouled a lot. So this was a really big problem for him. So he went to see Rick Barry. Rick Barry was the guy who could not miss. He actually had a career average of 89.3% and he got better and better as his career progressed in the last two years of his career, he had a 94% success rate from free throws. But he actually threw in a really interesting way. He threw underhand, which is actually kind of a cool word for the, Just Evil Enough book, because he shot underhand. But he was the best at shooting. But this was called the Granny Style. This is, you know, if you throw like a girl, you throw under hand. He didn't care. His father had drummed it into him from a very young age, how to shoot underhand, overhand, underhand, overhand, and he could just nail it every single time.So Chamberlain went to see Barry learned to shoot underhand and his performance doubled. He went from a career low, to a career high, in that same game where he scored a hundred points. So it turns out it's a much better approach. However, Chamberlain didn't have the guts to keep shooting underhand because he cared too much about what people thought. His career best was 61% from the line in 1961, he sank 28 of 32 free throws against the New York Knicks.So after a while, though, he reverted to shooting the way he knew, and his percentages  plunged. And he admitted that he felt like a sissy. He worried too much about what other people thought. And unlike Barry who was rational, Chamberlain was being agreeable and wrong. Barry meanwhile said he could be as selfish as he wanted to without hurting his team. So being a little bit disagreeable or asking yourself what you're prepared to do is a really good first start. Alistair Croll: Just to chime in quickly, we've all heard of growth hacking right? Growth hacking is these little tricks that get people to click a button or move down a funnel or whatever. The problem with any of these known tricks is that they're known.  Andrew Chen talks about the law of shitty click-through rates, which is simply the idea that as you find a vulnerability, if you will, a way to change the market, it becomes widely known immediately.So the first click-through ad on Hot Wired had an average of 44% click-through rate. Some people say it was as high as 70% for a banner ad. What's that at now? Emily? Brian Ardinger: Well, industry averages will tell you, or they'll tell you it's 0.1%. But in my opinion, it's closer to 0.02%, if you're lucky. Alistair Croll: So that's a huge decline. Same thing happened with email and so on. And so there are these known hacks that are the sort of marketing equivalent of a script kitty, who's running an attack on WordPress. And if you haven't patched your site, you'll be selling Viagra off your website. What you should be doing is trying to find the marketing equivalent of a zero day exploit.So in security a zero day, is an attack that nobody knows about yet. And they're incredibly valuable. Two of them were used to retard the Iranian nuclear program and damaged centrifuges. The marketing equivalent of a zero day exploit, we call this zero day marketing, is finding a new way to get a platform to behave in an unintended manner, with which you can create attention you can turn into profitable demand. And there's some amazing examples of like Farmville, for example. When Farmville's app would send you a message saying, Hey, Brian, Alistair's cows need some grain. And you'd click on it. Now you're a user. Well, they got to 30 million users before Facebook went, Whoa, we maybe don't want apps posting to people's friend feeds.There are so many examples of this, and we can tell you those examples. But the point is you can't use those examples because they've already been done. Right? What you have to do is devote much more of your time to inventing your own zero day marketing exploits. Brian Ardinger: So from that perspective, is it a series of experiments that you just have to run? You, you come up with some ideas and you run them like that, or is this, talk me through the process of how you get better at it? Emily Ross: One of the examples that I like to share, if you see it often enough, you begin to understand how you can apply the thinking. It's a model and you just try and apply it to your own environment. So if we take the information asymmetry, and example, the idea of subverting, one thing for another. Or a bait and switch. The idea of you're selling one thing, but actually getting another and Tupperware parties did this, you know, you think you're going for dinner and you end up getting guilt ridden into buying a load of plastic.But when I was working in a comparison platform, we subverted the PR channel for the generation of white hat backlinks. So PR is generally around building brand and brand awareness. But one of the side effects of PR was the generation of backlinks. So this is back in like maybe 2013. So what we did was we mined data. We attached big data trends to celebrities, pushed out, press releases to high value domains, and pretty much one in five hit would generate a backlink. When we started. We had about 1400 high quality backlinks. And we were generating about 60,000 non-brand organic visits to site per day. And after three years of pushing out two releases a month, month in, month out, we had over four and a half thousand unique domain backlinks and almost 200,000 non-brand organic visits per day.And this was a platform that turned traffic into money. I won't tell you how, but what we did for example, was we mined hair transplant trends and prices. And one example of the many, many crazy pushes we did was the Jude Law index of baldness. So here's a scale up from Colin Farrell all the way up to Dr. Evil,  of how bald are you? And you find yourself on the index and you see, Oh, this is how much it would cost for me to have hair transplants. It was a price comparison website for private health clinics. And this was a fun, interesting way to attract attention and turn it into traffic to the sites. But actually it wasn't really about traffic. It was always about the backlinks. So one in five hits generate a backlink, but again, it was channel burnout. It was a zero day exploit because you know, over the course of the three years, the number of backlinks that were being generated, went from maybe one in five to one in 10, because the platforms themselves started to recognize the value that they were accidentally giving away.So naturally you get published in a paper. If there's an online version of it, they print it online and they put a backlink out. It was a side effect of the real, a pure PR. And channel burn happened, those backlinks are no longer as readily available as they were. But it worked for about three years, four years. It was a fun time. Brian Ardinger:  You have to have a continuous funnel  yourself of new things that you need to explore it. Emily Ross: Exactly.  Exactly. So that was a, we had a good run, but it's about thinking about, well, what is the channel? What is the platform? So PR was the channel and we used it in a way. It wasn't intended to be used for our benefits. And so what are your channels? How can you use them differently? And that's a really great question to ask of yourself, no matter what you're doing. Alistair Croll: One of the things we often do is. What has changed in a technology platform. So for example, Travis Kalanick has this new startup Cloud Kitchens. What has changed in restaurants? Well, first of all, there's a huge abundance of restaurants that I could order from. Far more than I would know about. So I'm already overwhelmed with selection when I go to order food, because we're all at home, in a pandemic, ordering food. And second of all, The fact that the storefront is virtual, it means one kitchen can have many restaurant front ends. And so Cloud Kitchens will set you up with brands and their brands have games like Fucking Good Pizza, My Pasta, Dirty Little Vegan Bitch, Don't Grill My Cheese. None of these tell you about food, but when you're overwhelmed, and you have that sort of paradox of choice, you go, no, I'll just order it from that one. That sounds fine. Right? That's only possible because that brand is part of an experiment. You're ordering from an experiment. And they're constantly testing, which ones get more attention and then the restaurant can deliver all of those things that might be the same kitchen. And so Cloud Kitchens has taken advantage of an exploit within the traditional model of food ordering. So it's looking at, you know, what technology changes or combinations of technology, makes something possible that wasn't possible before that you can then subvert to your ends. Brian Ardinger: How do you go from not just creating a gimmick or how do you, I guess also approach being wrong, like trying these things and, and being wrong?Emily Ross: Growth hacking is gimmicks. Growth Hacking is doing something that maybe it's a publicity stunt or, I mean, one of the examples that we use in the book is pairing two things unexpectedly together. That's a great way to draw attention and Heineken did this really well in the UK just last week, where they put out a mobile hairdressing units and bar, so you could get a free haircut and a pint together.So this generated publicity and it's nice, but it's gimmicky, right? Is that really going to move their needle? You know, for the year? Possibly not. It's a nice story. So, but if you look at governments have been doing this for years and they've done it so well, there's a really good example in the book, which I won't go into now about how the government shamed people into stopping spitting in the twenties, as they tried to fight TB. Instead of just saying it's bad to spit, they actually made people feel bad, and socially, and vulgar  by spitting because before that it was perfectly normal.And if you look at the Chinese government, they use Fapiao.  Fapiao  are receipts. And they use Fapiao  as a lottery to fight corruption. So this is really interesting. In China, corruption can be rampant. Merchants will give their customers a discount, if the customer doesn't ask for a receipt.So the merchant doesn't have to report the income and like just pockets to the savings. The government used an incentive to combat this called Fapiao, which is a receipt  from the merchant. And there's a couple of hacks in here that are super clever. So the merchants have to buy the receipts beforehand and then hand them out to customers in return for payment.So the first one is the merchant has to pay tax before the transaction. That's really smart. And then customers demand their Fapiao, because there's a scratch and win lottery element. And then the government runs the lottery and customers can scratch off the panel to see if they've won anything. And so the second hack there is create demand for a receipt by making it a game.And then of course the government can also adjust the prize amount of each lottery to create just the right amount of incentive. So they're literally able to alter the rewards of the game to like tilt the Nash equilibrium, which is just like super smart. So you can do this at a macro level and absolutely get away with it.Alistair Croll: I want to just make sure we address your question about gimmicks. One of the big differences between a Zero Day Exploit and traditional Growth Hacking is that it's not known. But another is that it is intrinsic to your business model. The haircuts aren't intrinsic to Heineken's beer, but when Dropbox launched, they were the first to pioneer this, both of us get something. I invite you, we both get storage. That's built into the product, right. That's intrinsic to the system itself. And I think what it means is that you're factoring in Zero Day Exploits, marketing exploits, to your business model and your product roadmap. Not just to your marketing campaigns. I mean, Genghis Khan's  a good example, right?It wasn't just a tactic. It was a fundamental change in how he thought that societies could be ruled. So the real lesson here is, I'll give you one more example. There's a company that makes software called Energage  and they make workplace surveys. So they would sell to an enterprise and the enterprise would survey their employees and do  360 stuff. And so on. But the way they go to market is they launched this thing called the top workplaces project in concert with the Washington Post, the Denver Post, the Dallas Morning News and so on. And they run this survey and they say to these newspapers, Hey everybody, here's the survey. We'll take care of it.So now you go do it. And like, Whoa, isn't this great. My company is one of the best workplaces. I'll buy an ad in the newspaper. Everything's wonderful. And then Energage can go back and go, Hey, congratulations on being the third best workplace in Nebraska. Too bad about the other results. And you go what other results? Well, you know, we got more data than that, would you like to see it? Okay. And now you have a new customer, right? It's intrinsic to the business model, right. Rather than just being a little trick or hack. Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting point. And it also goes to the point where you see a lot of these examples in startups, because you can build it early on into the business model and that. How does this play out for a large existing company that wants to try to use some of these tactics?Emily Ross: So big companies really need to think about reframing and they also need to give themselves permission to think in ways they're not used to. One of the exercises I like to recommend is called a pre-mortem. And you basically give them permission to imagine the worst possible outcome. You invite them to invent the worst, worst, worst thing that could possibly happen and then work backwards from there.And it's amazing what happens in an environment like that, because that group think is real. That tribal behaviors of wanting to be agreeable and wanting everyone to pull together is very much a systematic thing that you see in large organizations. So giving them permission to think disagreeably.  Giving them methods to reframe where they are, what they do. These are all great frameworks for them to try and think subversively. Alistair Croll: First of all, I think that it's really important. I mean, I would consider a marketing department, have a Red Team. Have a second group, hmm, that has the same product and resources, but their job is to put the first group out of business. What do you do? Right. That's just hypothetical. You're going to think better. We Red Team on security. We Red Team on PR. Why don't we read team on go-to-market strategies.  And the second thing is, if you look at great brands that changed how people discussed a product or a service, they found a frame of reference that favored them. For decades we used to talk about electric cars. We would talk about sustainability and range. Pretty boring stuff, right? Lots of hippies sitting around going let's save the planet and look at my Prius. Elon Musk put one of them on a race track against supercar and beat it. And all of a sudden the conversation on electric cars was performance. He'd reframed the discussion about electric vehicles to performance, right?When Gmail first launched, your inbox on Hotmail or Yahoo mail had 10 mgs. That's like one photo, right? We don't remember that. My daughter doesn't believe this. When Gmail came along, Google knew that they did not have strength in folders and archiving and hierarchy and export, but they were good at with search and storage.So they said, Hey, email's not about your ability to manage your folders and your inbox and organization and management. It's about abundance storage. And they reinforced that so much that they actually had a counter showing you how much storage you get. Salesforce, when it first launched, was a web based CRM, but web-based CRMs had very few features compared to Siebel and Vantive and Clarify, companies that you don't see anymore.So they said no CRM is about not needing IT. In fact, their logo was no software. They had us the word software with a slash through it, despite the fact that they own their own programming language called Apex. Right? And so each of these companies found a way to reframe things, even like Listerine. Listerine was this clinical health thing. And then along comes scope and says, Hey, you know what? Mouthwash is actually about being attractive and sexy, not about clinical health. One action that a lot of big brands should take is to step back and say, what is a new frame that favors us and disadvantages our competition. And then what is it about that frame of reference that we can do to prove it that will then allow the customer to find a different way of valuing the product?Emily Ross: I would also chime in there and talk about generally large marketing teams will have, they'll have done their marketing degrees and their MBAs or masters on they'll turn out the four P's from, you know, the 1960s or the seven P's of service. And like there's too much P. Just stop peeing. Guys just stopped doing it.Right. Chuck, all of that in the bin and start thinking about creating attention. And it's as simple and as complicated as that. We talk about human motivation and Alistair  I think coined laid, made, paid, afraid. I tidy that up a bit to the piratey AARG. Which is appeal, authority, risk, and greed. So think about your customers. Think about your competitors. Think about the marketplace through the lens of human behavior and whether you're selling radiator bits or cars or Cola, people have all those very basic triggers. They want to be liked that's appeal. They want power that's authority. They want to feel safe. That's the risk lens.And then greed, you know, people want the things that they want. So. We're just human meat bags, right? We're just walking bags of meat with emotions. We have very simple motivations at the end of the day. And in a B2B setting for a big organization, the AARG framework is a really useful function. Like, so throw out the P. Think about AARG.And if you're trying to convince people to act, you need to appeal to base emotions more than you do plain reason, because most people really aren't very rational. There's also really a good examples of the seven deadly sins. If you look at the big, big enterprises, I think Chris Pack said this on Twitter.I thought it was really, really good. Uber and Amazon are slough. Instagram and Tik Tok are pride. Door Dash is gluttony. Tinder is lust. Pinterest is envy. Twitter is rath. And Bitcoin is greed. So think about the fundamentals. Just think about the basics. We haven't changed all that much. Alistair Croll: But I think the biggest thing here is that big brands haven't realized that the biggest risk they face is that someone else will subvert attention that they could otherwise be getting and turned into their profitable demand. And so if you don't do that, you're going to get eaten alive. If we can get the world to realize that the biggest risk is not whether you will build something, but whether anyone will care, we've already given people a huge headstart.Brian Ardinger: Well, and the fact that the world is changing so fast on the fact that you can go from company like Airbnb in 12 years to being, you know, one of the most recognizable brands, you know, overnight effectively from what used to be to build a business. New technologies, new marketplaces, new access to talent. All of that is just accelerating the opportunities to be disrupted. Alistair Croll: We used to have a new platform come along. You know, we had writing that took a few thousand years. Then we got to radio. It took a few hundred years. And then we got to television that took a decade, the rate of introduction of new platforms. And therefore, if you're thinking like a hacker new attack surfaces, Is incredible, right? The Cloud Kitchens example happened because of the pandemic and the rise of Uber Eats and Door Dash, and so on. The pace at which new exploit opportunities appear is very, very fast. And as a result, there are far more opportunities to subvert the status quo or the norms of your industry with one of these new platforms.So we're trying to get people to be much more opportunistic. And part of what we do, like I said I can't tell you do this thing, because if I tell you, then it's already been done. What we can do is we can say, here are some ways to think about it. You know, is there an innovation that happens? Can you reframe things? Can you do a substitution where people think they're getting one thing and they're actually getting another. Can you appeal to the foibles of human psychology? Emily Ross: Don't be afraid to be disagreeable. Alistair Croll: It's weird because in the past I've written books that are very technical. There is a right answer. And Emily's written lots of articles on like how to do stuff. This is a more subjective thing and candidly more uncomfortable for us as writers, because we want to make sure that there are applicable lessons, but it's almost like, you know, teaching someone Zen. I can tell you what it is, but you're going to have to go sit on a rock and figure it out for yourself.But once you start thinking this way, everything becomes a subversive opportunity. And once you have that subversive lens, you're not being evil, you're just being just evil enough. Opportunities are everywhere. Emily Ross: And actually, if you think about it, just coming back to your very first question, which is a nice cyclicity.  The title of the book is exactly what we set out to do, which is we got your attention and we're turning it into demand. So the book title is a really, really simple and effective way to showcase the thinking. And I think if you take one thing away from it, it's change what you spend your time on. So building a subversive go-to market strategy is just as important as thinking about your product. And if you get the balance, right, you're going to be unstoppable. Brian Ardinger: Well, and you've also from the book perspective, the book's not out yet, but you're doing things to grab attention differently than a lot of, I mean, I get pitched every other day by a book author trying to get their book noticed and that. But I know that you've been doing some things as far as live online course that's leading up to the book. And you have a interesting little survey. I don't, if we got to talking about any of the things that you're doing from a attention perspective to, about the book. Emily Ross: Well one of the things I love, this was so much fun, is that you can't just order the book. You can't just pre-order it. You have to take a quiz so that we can decide if you're evil enough. So you take the quiz and if you're not evil enough, we think, you know, you're not going to be able to handle the book. And if you're too evil, then this book could just perhaps be too powerful. So we have gamified the experience of the pre-order function, which was a lot of fun. And we've done a ton of tons of things, just mostly because we'd like to mess around, but that's just one of the things we've done so far. Alistair Croll: It's also great that Emily has like a whole team of web developers that stand up.  Emily's business is actually, she's like the SWAT team or the MI6 for some very advanced tech brands, who can't really explain what they do well. And Emily figures out how to do that. So she has a team of people to build stuff. So a good example of that is we wanted to do a survey to see whether people would take our cohort based course, which we're going to be running with Maven, the founders of  Alt MBA and UDemy,   set up this new, online cohort based course program. But we wanted to get people to take the survey. So we told them one lucky winner will get a free workshop or talk from us for their organization, which is usually something we charged a lot of money for. But we also wanted to make sure they shared the survey, which is a paradox because I want the greatest odds of winning. So I'm not going to tell my friends, right?So we made two surveys. One was Team Orange, one was Team Black. And we say, we'll choose the winner from the survey that has the most responses. That's a bit subversive. Right. And we found some funny things about people getting kind of tribal and like I'm Team Black and so on. We even did things to tweak the survey questions a little bit between the two.So we ran like six or seven social experiments in the survey. But would you buy a book from people who weren't thinking subversively? I mean, I wouldn't buy a book on subversiveness for someone who went through normal tactics. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Absolutely. Well, I appreciate you both coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share some of this subversiveness and hopefully get more folks to be Just Evil Enough. People want to find out more about yourself or the book itself, what's the best way to do that. Emily Ross: Just Evil Enough.com and I'll actually, I landed Alistair in it on a talk we did last week because we were live Tweeting. They wouldn't let us take live questions. So we just got everyone to jump on Twitter and ask us questions there.And I promised everyone lives that if they hashtag Just Evil Enough that Alistair would read out whatever they wrote. And they all said smart, intelligent things. And I was like, I can't believe none of you are like trying to flog a course or a book or promote something. Like he will have to say anything you like. So people should...Alistair Croll: I think one guy had me mention his podcast, but there's a good example where like, Oh, you think you're getting free promotion in this thing we're recording, but you're actually following the Just Evil Enough account. Emily Ross: But yes, Just Evil Enough.com is where you can take the quiz. You can hear about the cohort class. You can, pre-order the book and there's an Evil Enough Twitter account too. You can check that out. Brian Ardinger: Well Emily, it was great to meet you for the first time here and Alistair. Always good to catch up with what's going on in your world. So appreciate you both for being on here and looking forward to the conversation in the future.Alistair Croll: Thanks so much for having us. Emily Ross: Thanks Brian.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

In this episode with Ben Yoskovitz, Founding Partner at Highline BETA, we talk about the following: His best selling book Lean Analytics and the opportunities that come with being an author His startup accelerator that lead to an acquisition with Airbnb How startups and big companies can work together What traits he looks for in startup founders And, most importantly, his advice for anyone that wants to do angel investing  RESOURCES: Lean Analytics Highline BETA ABOUT THE PODCAST Jim Huffman blog Twitter GrowthHit The Growth Marketer's Playbook

Petit à petit, le Product Management a su se faire sa place en entreprise, bousculant les méthodes de travail traditionnelles, silotées et centrées sur l'entreprise, pour leur préférer une approche agile et centrée sur l'utilisateur.Derrière ce buzzword, se cache une nouvelle fonction qui accompagne la conception d'un produit avant et pendant sa mise sur le marché. Le rôle du Product Manager est celui d'un chef d'orchestre, à la frontière entre la stratégie, la technique et l'expérience utilisateur.Mais alors, quels changements organisationnels implique le Product Management et surtout, quels en sont les avantages ? Quelles sont les missions du Product Manager et quelle différence entre ce rôle et celui de Product Owner ?Au micro de Laure Constantinesco, Romain Garnier, Product Manager chez OCTO, vous explique tout dans ce cinquième épisode de OCTO Buzzword Bingo !Ressources :A lire :"Hacking Growth" de Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown"Inspired : how to create products customers love" de Marty Cagan"Lean Analytics" de Alistair Croll & Benjamin Yoskowitz"Lean Startup" de Eric Ries"Team Topologies" de Matthew Skelton & Manuel PaisTous les articles du blog OCTO Talks sur le Product Management Renseignez-vous sur la formation dispensée par OCTO Academy pour devenir Product Manager, s'approprier la démarche et créer des produits digitaux impactants.Crédits :Un podcast proposé par OCTO Technology, écrit, réalisé et enregistré par LACOLAB (Laure Constantinesco et Charlotte Abdelnour). Sound Design et mixage : Paul Love (The Clean Sound). Musique originale : AudioJungle / Ocean_Studio.

国内外のモバイルアプリマーケティングの最新トレンド情報を解説する「Mobile Update // モバイルアップデート」略して「#モバアプ」 今回は社内外問わずよくご質問を頂く「アプリマーケティングの最新・鉄板情報をどこからインプットしているの？」という質問に答えるべく、本・ウェブサイト・SNSアカウントをまとめました！ 日本ではアプリマーケに特化した情報ソースがあまりないので、海外のソースを中心にピックアップしてみたので参考になれば幸いです。 尚、今回取り上げた各種情報は概要欄下部の他、noteやスプレッドシートにもまとめて随時更新していきますのでそちらも注目ください！ 皆さんのオススメのインプット方法やソースもぜひぜひ教えてくださいー！ ハッシュタグ 「#モバアプ」でご意見ご感想もお待ちしてます！ ■ Speaker 稲田宙人 / Hiroto Inada Twitter：https://twitter.com/HirotoInada note：https://note.com/hiroto_inada 伊藤直樹 / Naoki Ito Twitter：https://twitter.com/n_11o note：https://note.com/n_110709 ■ 番組でご紹介した本・ブログ・SNSアカウント一覧 # 本 - ①アニンディヤ・ゴーシュ：Tapスマホで買ってしまう9つの理由 - ②Nir Eyal：Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products - ③金山 裕樹・梶谷 健人：いちばんやさしいグロースハックの教本 人気講師が教える急成長マーケティング戦略 - ④Sean Ellis・Morgan Brown：モーガンブラウンHacking Growth グロースハック完全読本 - ⑤予想どおりに不合理: 行動経済学が明かす「あなたがそれを選ぶわけ」 - ⑥はじめてのUIデザイン 改訂版 - ⑦アリステア・クロール：Lean Analytics ―スタートアップのためのデータ解析と活用法 # ブログ ## 日次 - The Cohort - Business of Apps - MobileMarketingReads ## 週次・不定期 - アプリマーケティング研究所 - Mobile Dev Memo - Mobile Growth Stack - ASO Stack ## 決定版 - Reforge - Startup School - Growth.Design ## QAコミュニティ - Quora - GrowthHackers # SNS ## ASO - ilia kukharev(@ilyakuh) - Thomasbcn(@Thomasbcn) - Nadir(@Nadir) ## App Marketing - Eric Seufert(@eric_seufert) - Andy Carvell(@andy_carvell)

Hablamos del ICE Framework y de las etapas de crecimiento propuestas por Alistair Croll y Benjamin Yoskovitz  en su libro Lean Analytics. Dale un play. al episodio si quieres saber más al respecto y si te interesan los temas mencionados te dejo el link para que puedas adquirir el libro.    Libro en Español: https://amzn.to/35G0rs5 Libro en  Inglés: https://amzn.to/2MYNCT3

When you think of innovation, businesses like banks and manufacturers likely won't come to mind. But as you'll learn in this episode, those massive businesses require a special mindset in order to get their customers to care. Innovation expert Ben Yoskovitz joins Katelyn Bourgoin to share: How To Find Out What Customers Really Care About Why Big Companies Need To Focus Small To Think Big What It Takes To Have An Innovation Mindset And So Much More Ben Yoskovitz is a founding partner of the innovation firm Highline Beta. He is also the co-author of Lean Analytics. Twitter: https://twitter.com/byosko LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/byosko/ Highline Beta: https://highlinebeta.com/ ---- Follow Katelyn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KateBour Get your free Customer Ranking Calculator: https://www.subscribepage.com/newcalculator

In this episode of the iPhreaks Show, Alex Bush talks to Tom Hammond about game app monetization and live ops in mobile gaming. They cover different ways to monetize your game and complexities of showing popups, surveys, and other live in-game events to players. Sponsors Audible.com CacheFly Panel Alex Bush Guest Tom Hammond Links Podcast – The Monetization Minute Roast my app – free advice for apps https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-hammond/ https://www.theoremreach.com/ Picks Alex Bush: Lean Analytics The Mom Test Tom Hammond: Thinking Fast and Slow Influence Follow iPhreaks Show on Twitter > @iphreaks

In this episode of the iPhreaks Show, Alex Bush talks to Tom Hammond about game app monetization and live ops in mobile gaming. They cover different ways to monetize your game and complexities of showing popups, surveys, and other live in-game events to players. Sponsors Audible.com CacheFly Panel Alex Bush Guest Tom Hammond Links Podcast – The Monetization Minute Roast my app – free advice for apps https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-hammond/ https://www.theoremreach.com/ Picks Alex Bush: Lean Analytics The Mom Test Tom Hammond: Thinking Fast and Slow Influence Follow iPhreaks Show on Twitter > @iphreaks

mag. Maja Voje, podjetnica in mednarodna strokovnjakinja za digitalno trženje Maja Voje je svojo kariero gradila v vodilnih tehnoloških podjetjih, kot sta Google in Rocket Internet. Kot predavateljica sodeluje pri enem izmed najbolje prodajanih spletnih tečajev na Udemy spletni učilnici, ki ga je opravilo že več kot 50.000 mednarodnih študentov. Kot zunanja svetovalka je pomagala razvijati strategije rast in vzpostaviti interdisciplinarne “growth” ekipe več kot 100 ameriškim, nemškim, avstrijskim, belgijskim in slovenskim podjetjem v visokotehnološkem sektorju. V svoji karieri je več podjetjem pomagala do 10-25 milijonskih investicij. Svoje znanje je plemenitila na Saïd Business School, Univerza Oxford, na Wirtschaftsuniversität na Dunaju in Inštitutu za mednarodno trgovanje v Šanghaju. Zadnji dosežek: • Head od Growth University za GrowthHackers.com - 0.5 mio skupnost Zanimivosti: • V preteklem letu mentorirala preko 50 podjetij • Uveljavila sem se v tujini, preden so me v SLO začeli jemat resno :) • Sem obseden timeboxer in postavljalec ciljev - vsak teden si v nedeljo napišem 16 ciljev in si potimeboxam teden pred mano, da bo ja čas za vse. Te cilje tudi vsako jutro berem. To me drži zelo fokusirano in mi daje občutek, da se življenje premika v začrtano smer. Quote: Diamanti se ustvarjajo pod pritiskom. You win some, you lose some. Naj knjiga: The Challenger Sale; Hacking Growth & Growth Hacking for Dummies; Lean Analytics; The Passion Economy Naj serija: RuPaul Drag Race Hobiji: Gym, druženja s kolegi, mastermindanje kako se naša disciplina razvija z Američani Najljubša hrana: Karkoli se dobro ujema z vinom, na primer siri - OMG siri Najljubši podjetnik: Dave Ramsey Naj app: Google Calendar Njeni nauki: · Vsak ima na dosegu prstov svetovno zakladnico znanja, potem pride do števila 10.000 ur kam si pripravljen vlagat - rast ali Netflix? :) Ne bodi suženj dopaminu. · Upaj si in bodi proaktiven. Če ne vprašaš/predlagaš/deluješ, se ne bo nič spremenilo. · Ko slišiš ne, si misli "ne zdaj". Ne jemalji stvari osebno. Razvij toleranco na zavrnitve in jih jemlji kot del učenja. · Ne postani suženj načrtu. V svetu, v katerem živimo, se je potrebno hitro odzivati na priložnosti in zaupati svoji izbiri. *Slovenian Research Agency, Program P5-0364 – The Impact of Corporate Governance, Organizational Learning, University of Ljubljana, School of Economics and Business, Slovenia.

After a start in digital software, Kate Rutter realized that qualitative definitions of success could, and needed to be, made more quantitative. Years later, she’s Principal at Intelleto, Adjunct Professor in the IXD program at California College of the Arts, and the instructor of our upcoming UX workshop “Crafting Metrics for UX Success." https://rosenfeldmedia.com/public-ux-workshops/crafting-metrics-for-ux-success/ In this episode, she reflects on the extraordinary success with qualitative metrics she has observed in the UX field, and the room for growth around numerical metrics, as well as the many challenges companies are faced with when trying to determine which metrics really matter. Kate’s four part workshop (August 6-7 and August 13-14) is intended to help designers gain a numerical understanding of success—and determine what metrics they need to measure in the first place (not just the easy ones!) Kate’s recommended reading: • Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Analytics-Better-Startup-Faster/dp/1449335675 • The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Muller https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Metrics-Jerry-Z-Muller/dp/0691174954 • Don’t Let Metrics Undermine Your Business, Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2019/09/dont-let-metrics-undermine-your-business Kate’s shoutouts Julie Zhuo https://medium.com/@joulee John Cutler https://medium.com/@johnpcutler Laura Klein https://rosenfeldmedia.com/people/laura-klein/ Follow Kate on Twitter www.twitter.com/katerutter

On this episode of The Artists of Data Science, we get a chance to hear from Alistair Croll, a well-established entrepreneur, analyst, and author. He's the author of Lean Analytics, when we co-wrote with Benjamin Yoskovitz. He's also one of the founders of Coradiant, Year One Labs, and the Strata confersence. He shares some excellent tips one how to ask the right questions when working with data, essentials of business communication, and the need to be obsessed as an entrepreneur. WHAT YOU WILL LEARN: [28:28] How to be an intrepreneur [13:39] Incorporate philosophy with data [19:11] Why you need to be obsessed as an entrepreneur QUOTES [14:22] …”as an early stage company, your focus is your biggest currency.” [22:10] …”crises have a way of accelerating the inevitable.” [46:04] “...you got to first seek to engage and entertain and then you have the ability to inform people.” [51:38] …”find a way to capture attention that you can turn into profitable demand better than the competition.” WHERE TO FIND ALISTAIR ONLINE: Twitter:https://twitter.com/acroll LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/alistaircroll/ Website: http://solveforinteresting.com/ SHOW NOTES [00:01:37] Introduction for our guest today [00:03:20] Alistair talks about his early work with Coradiant [00:05:47] What do you think the next two to five years is going to look like for businesses leveraging data and analytics? [00:07:55] Why A.I. will need a therapist [00:08:26] In this new vision of the future then what's really going to separate, like the great data scientists from just the merely good ones? [00:11:03] The importance of privacy and GDPR for data scientists [00:13:56] The concept of "one metric that matters" and how that's going to manifest in terms ofmeasuring privacy [00:15:00] Why Zoom DOES NOT deserve to be the videoconferencing platform in the world [00:17:30] Do you have any advice or tips for anyone who's been toying with the idea of entrepreneurship? [00:19:22] Why we need to instill leaps of faith in people who want to be founders [00:21:06] In terms of data science, entrepreneurship in this COVID/post-COVID area. What do you see as some problems with tackling that in enterprising data? Scientists can can identify and then get into an opportunity? [00:22:29]So you've been writing a lot about innovation at Tilt to the Windmill. How should be incumbents think about innovation? [00:23:02]A deep dive into various models of innovation [00:26:38] An excellent and thorough discussion on intrapreneur [00:30:37] Some great advice for one man data science teams who are on an intrapreneurial journey [00:33:50] The stages of growth intrapreneur developing data products within their organization will face and how to overcome challenges in those stages [00:36:50] We get into music science and its intersection with data science [00:43:13] What's your go to music? [00:43:54] The important soft-skills that a data scientist needs for success [00:47:11] What are some key takeaways from your book - Propose, Prepare, Present - that you think a data scientist should apply when communicating with non-technical audiences? [00:49:27] Let's talk a bit about being evil. You say start-ups should be more evil, that sounds terrible. What are you thinking? What are you trying to communicate with that? [00:53:23] What's the one thing you want people to learn from your story? [00:54:24] What's it mean to solve for interesting? [00:56:00] Jumping into a quick lightning round: What would be the number one book, other fiction or non-fiction or both that you'd recommend our audience read and your most impactful takeaway from it? [00:57:19] If we could somehow get a magical telephone that allowed you to contact 18 year old Allistair. What would you tell him? [00:58:45] What it means to cultivate a personality [01:00:07] What's something you've done at one of your ventures that's been just evil enough? [01:02:57] What's the best advice you've ever received? [01:04:58] What motivates you? [01:06:10]So what song do you currently have on repeat? [01:06:34] How could people connect with you? Where can they find you? Special Guest: Alistair Croll.

Som marknadsförare så arbetar man ofta i olika typer av projekt och för att lyckas i dessa krävs såväl bra projektledning som taktiskt genomförande. För att utvecklas inom digital taktik och hur man effektivt genomför ett projekt så bjöd jag in en av Sveriges främsta experter på området. Jesper Åström. Jesper är en digital taktiker och beskriver det med egna ord som att han tar över när strateger och kreatörer har utfört sitt arbete, och är med i utförandet och planerandet av utförandet. Han är tveklöst en av Sveriges främsta på området och jobbar sedan flera år tillbaka som konsult i projekt över hela världen med några av världens största varumärken och företag. Jesper har även varit med och startat upp flera framgångsrika digitala byråer som For Sure och Honesty samt haft ledande roller i marknadsteam. Jesper har även under många år föreläst och varit lärare på Hyper Island inom digital marknadsföring, growth och data där han även varit med och lagt upp utbildningsprogram. Som om det inte vore nog så har han även skrivit boken The System som handlar om att sprida budskap, skapa nätverk och viral mekanik. En bok som du som lyssnare även kan ladda ner helt gratis. Ladda ner The System. Om avsnittet Vi börjar avsnittet med att prata om hur Jesper ser på att leda och genomföra projekt inom marknadsföring och hur det skiljer sig från traditionell projektledning. Jesper förklarar bland annat vad som är viktigt att få på plats innan man startar ett projekt. Vi pratar sedan om olika tillväxtmodeller och system som Jesper använder för att driva projekt, vad som skiljer dessa och hur han väljer modell för projekt. Jesper beskriver sedan hur han strukturerar upp ett projekt och vilka faser han går igenom från start till avslut. Du får även höra om: Hur han prioriterar olika insatser och aktiviteter Varför SEO är det viktigaste taktiska greppet Och Jespers bästa tips för att genomföra projekt Här nedan hittar du som vanligt länkar till alla resurser som nämns i intervjun. Och efter länkarna så hittar du tidsstämplar till olika sektioner i intervjun. Länkar Jesper Åström på LinkedIn Jesper Åström på Instagram Jesper Åström på Twitter Jespers YouTube-kanal Jesper Åström webbsida AIDA (modell) AAARRR (modell) LEAN Analytics (modell) SWOT (modell) SAMR (modell) JTBD (modell) The System (modell) Marknadschef.com (projekt) Och här kan du ladda ner Jespers bok The System. Helt gratis. Tidsstämplar [3:14] Vi börjar prata om hur Jesper ser på projektledning och vad han som digital taktiker gör. Han lyfter även skillnaden på marknadsföringsprojekt från traditionella projekt, vad många gör fel och vad man måste få på plats före man startar. [10:09] Vi pratar processer och modeller där Jesper lyfter fram olika tillväxtmodeller såsom AAARR, Lean analytics, SAMR, AIDA, Service design, Jobs to be done och The System. Jesper förklarar även hur han väljer modell. [13:21] Jesper beskriver sedan vad de olika modellerna innebär för hur man sätter sina mål och utvärderar ett projekt. Sedan går han igenom hur han strukturerar upp ett projekt och de faser eller steg han går igenom. [21:13] Vi pratar om varför Jesper hellre väljer Google Sheets och e-post istället för Slack och projekthanteringsverktyg. Jesper förklarar sedan hur han tänker kring att samordna personer och team i olika projekt. [26:03] Jesper berättar om hur han prioriterar olika insatser och aktiviteter i projekt inom digital marknadsföring. Han presenterar en modell som han kommit fram till där sökmotoroptimering är prio nummer ett. Och hur han kommit fram till den. [36:21] Vi pratar om vad det innebär att vara datadriven och hur viktigt det är att arbeta datadrivet i projekt. Jesper beskriver sedan om hur man gör avvägningen mellan data och kreativt tänkande och hur man bestämmer väg att gå. [40:23] Jesper ger sina bästa tips för att lyckas med att genomföra marknadsföringsprojekt.

Have you ever felt like you had no control over a situation? Like your cards were already dealt. Some may feel like they have no control over their position in life. I have struggled for years on how to communicate how much power people actually have. Now, I tell them to look at Mark Metry. Mark has been able to transform himself to help others and watch people change for the better. Mark Metry is only twenty-two and is already a bestselling author of his new book, Screw Being Shy. Mark writes on how to communicate your authentic self and how to achieve a successful and happy life. Mark Metry once struggled with social anxiety. He was able to redesign himself and transform into his true self. Now, Mark is a Forbes Featured and International TEDx keynote speaker. Embracing his true self, Mark is a successful public speaker, author, and podcaster. Mark Metry is the host of a top 100 podcast called Humans 2.0. Mark Metry has made it his mission to spend his life trying to impact and influence others. We discuss the first steps to empower oneself and why you must learn to understand and align your own reality. We also share how you can grow your podcast audience and the common myths that surround being a podcast host. I highly recommend you checking out Mark's book Screw Being Shy which you can find here! jo.my/mark-metry-website/ Listen to the Podcast at https://pod.co/picnic-tmf/ or on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/tmf-picnic/id1495963496/ Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/5Mj5iY8IqefIbAxwX6rr3B/ Google Podcast https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZC5jby9waWNuaWMtdG1m/ Acast https://play.acast.com/s/TMF-Picnic], Stitcher/ https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/podcastdotco/tmf-picnic/ or on your favorite podcast platform. What did you take away from this episode? Let us know! Want more episodes pertaining to Self-Improvement and Personal Branding? Listen to TMF Picnic's episode on Jeannette Bridoux aka The Spiritual, Personal Branding/ Instagram Coach from the West https://pod.co/picnic-tmf/jeannette-bridoux-aka-the-spiritual-personal-branding-instagram-coach-from-the-west/ Listen to TMF Picnic's episode on David Brier aka One Brand-y Boiii https://pod.co/picnic-tmf/david-brier-aka-one-brand-y-boiiii/ Selected Links from the Episode: Want to Connect with Mark Metry? LinkedIn jo.my/mark-metry-linkedin/ Website jo.my/mark-metry-website/ Human 2.0 Podcast jo.my/human-2-0/ Twitter jo.my/mark-metry-twitter/ Books Mentioned in the Episode Clarity by Jamie Smart jo.my/clarity-jamie-smart/ Indistractable by Nir Eval jo.my/indistractable-nir-eval/ Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz jo.my/lean-analytics/

When you delve deep into marketing, beyond just the “likes” and first impressions of a company, you will find what really matters is the real growth marketers of the field who are changing the way marketing is being perceived. Using cutting edge programming models and full-funnel marketing, growth marketers are able to drive innovation through data.  One of these top players in the field is Jean Bonnenfant. A lead speaker and international growth marketing trainer for Growth Tribe France. What's really distinctive about Jean is that he is not just another marketer, he really knows how to play this sophisticated game that's involved in the industry. Jean Bonnenfant shares his insights on what makes a product or service thrive and what prevents a start-up from succeeding. Bonnenfant relies on data-driven, full-funnel marketing using tooling, code, psychology, and curiosity. Jean Bonnenfant is credited with training almost 1500 participants and has spoken at twenty-eight events with crowds up to 500 people.  Jean Bonnenfant over two years went from knowing nothing about growth marketing to becoming the head of Growth Tribe Training France. He started out in marketing at another company that wasn't the right cultural fit. He aimed to become the best trainer he could be and started speaking at conferences where he became an eminent public speaker. Bonnenfant focuses on retention and activation as he believes these will make a company greatly more successful in the long run. He trains people of this ability at the Growth Tribe's Advanced Growth Hacking Course.  In the interview today, Jean Bonnenfant shares some of the best skills to focus on if you want to push the limits, the significance of curiosity, retention curves, analytic frameworks, the advantages of rapid experimentation, and overall why Jean Bonnenfant is one of the most notable growth marketers out there!  What was your favorite tip or moment from the interview? Let us know!  Want more episodes pertaining to Growth Marketing? Listen to TMF Picnic's interview with Ricardo Ghekiere, An Actual Real-Life “Growth Marketer” With Great Hair! [http://tmfam.rocks/ricghek] Listen to TMF Picnic's interview with Fotis Panagio, The Mentor Hacker![http://tmfam.rocks/ft0pan] Selected Links:  Want to Connect with Jean Bonnenfant? LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/growth-hacking-speaker/)Twitter [https://twitter.com/bonnenfantjean?lang=en]Growth Tribe Website [https://growthtribe.io/] Identifying and Developing Soft Skills | Glassdoor [https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/guide/develop-soft-skills/] Lean Analytics | Alistair Croll & Benjamin Yoskovitz  [http://leananalyticsbook.com/] Trust Me, I'm Lying | Ryan Holiday [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13542853-trust-me-i-m-lying] Jeff Bezos Working Years in the Future | Business Insider [https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-forbes-interview-works-years-in-future-2018-9] Episode Show Notes What is Something That You Want People to Understand About You? [1:40]Has Your Curiosity Every Led You Somewhere Unexpected? [4:20]How Did You Go from Not Knowing What Growth Marketing Was to Two Years Later Being the Head of Training for Growth Tribe France? [8:19] How Did You Set Yourself Up to be Successful? [12:05] The Book, Lean Analytics, and Nailing Retention [18:35]Publicity Stunts or Something Much Simpler? [23:32] Getting Closer to The Truth—Being Customer Centric in Your Approach [28:35] Working Through the Change [33:53]How Do You Apply an Analytics Framework and Growth Marketing Mindset to Providing a Service? [41:45] Can You Elaborate on the Tracking Aspect of the Process? [50:55] What is the Number One Metric That You Are Tracking at Growth Tribe Right Now? [54:17] Inspiring Content on LinkedIn [55:30]Having Taken the Workshop for Growth Using AI, What is the Number One Thing You Have Learned? [58:06]Closing Thoughts [1:02:36]

Join in for a conversation with Ben Yoskovitz, CPO and Founding Partner of Highline Beta. Highline Beta is a venture capital and startup co-creation company based in Toronto. In our interview, we pan through Ben’s 20 year career as an entrepreneur, angel investor and startup executive. After graduating with a psychology degree, Ben started by building a web service business then a product based business and one of Canada’s earliest accelerators (where one of its companies was acquired by Airbnb). He then went to become the VP of Product at GoInstant and VarageSale while co-authoring The Lean Analytics book that’s been translated to more than 4 different languages. We go through the major learnings his had from his various ventures, his failures, his philosophy of building organizations and so much more!

Saiu mais um episódio do Knowledge Cast o podcast da K21. Nesse episódio falamos com a Lula, Tiago e o Guitte, direto da França, sobre como é ir para a Europa trabalhar com times de produtos e agilidade, principais desafios e como está o cenário local na Europa sobre comunidade ágil. Referências: Daniel Pink, Drive: https://www.amazon.com.br/Drive-Surprising-Truth-about-Motivates/dp/1594484805 Ray Immelman, Great Boss Dead Boss: https://www.amazon.com/Great-Boss-Dead-Ray-Immelman/dp/0974036919 Alistair Croll, Lean Analytics: https://www.amazon.com.br/Lean-Analytics-Better-Startup-Faster/dp/1449335675 Perfis e canais: Canal do Tiago no YouTube: https://youtu.be/TuuNiXdWqRA Perfil do Tiago: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiagorosa Perfil do Guitte: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guitte Perfil da K21: https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/company/knowledge21 Perfil Lula: https://twitter.com/luizphx

Ben Yoskovitz is the Founding Partner at Highline BETA, a startup co-creation company. He is also Co-Author of Lean Analytics and a former VP of VarageSale and GoInstant, which sold to Salesforce. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside innovation Founder, talks with Ben about corporate-startup collaboration. Ben started his first company in 1996 during University, where he got into tech and entrepreneurship. Since that time, he founded several other companies, ran products, and started one of the first accelerators in Canada called Year 1 labs. Ben applied the Lean Startup methodology to the companies they invested in, then wrote the book Lean Analytics. Soon he began angel investing and finally launched Highline BETA. Highline BETA Highline BETA believes by working with big companies, they can build better startups. Their service arm works with big companies to identify opportunities. Their fund arm finances them. This strategy can share risk. The corporate side realizes the big model is unlikely to survive. They must diversify. Outside the valley, startups think more about the business model and problems, which makes this collaboration an excellent fit. Highline BETA doesn’t assume they have all the ideas. Uses signals from inside of big companies of what they need, and has startups use this talent and resources from big companies. Coming to IO Summit. Speaking on Startup + Corporate Collaboration. What are the trends? Highline BETA is a commercial deal accelerator. Big companies with little companies in pilots. When they see pilots scaling, that’s a good sign. How do you navigate startups working with Corporates early? If startups need product and market and aren’t established, it’s tough to partner with corporates. Have to be ready for the relationship. Accelerators can provide the right interface with deal terms and expectations. Corporate Venture Capital - pros and cons. What’s the exchange of value becomes very important - Data, customers, co-marketing. Corporates work more slowly than startups. Future Trends Companies are starting to take a portfolio approach to everything they do. Building ventures organically - internal or external. Separating themselves from the core, or having an accelerator and investing in startups or co-creation. Not all will win but gives a nice balance. Difficult to disrupt when incentivized to keep core going. Must do everything, a balance. Don’t innovate on your own. Inorganic and organic. How do you streamline processes in working with startups? For More Information For more information or to connect with Ben Yoskovitz, check out Highline BETA. Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play. FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Ben Yoskovitz is the Founding Partner at Highline BETA, a startup co-creation company. He is also Co-Author of Lean Analytics and a former VP of VarageSale and GoInstant, which sold to Salesforce. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside innovation Founder, talks with Ben about corporate-startup collaboration. Ben started his first company in 1996 during University, where he got into tech and entrepreneurship. Since that time, he founded several other companies, ran products, and started one of the first accelerators in Canada called Year 1 labs. Ben applied the Lean Startup methodology to the companies they invested in, then wrote the book Lean Analytics. Soon he began angel investing and finally launched Highline BETA. Highline BETA Highline BETA believes by working with big companies, they can build better startups. Their service arm works with big companies to identify opportunities. Their fund arm finances them. This strategy can share risk. The corporate side realizes the big model is unlikely to survive. They must diversify. Outside the valley, startups think more about the business model and problems, which makes this collaboration an excellent fit. Highline BETA doesn’t assume they have all the ideas. Uses signals from inside of big companies of what they need, and has startups use this talent and resources from big companies. Coming to IO Summit. Speaking on Startup + Corporate Collaboration. What are the trends? Highline BETA is a commercial deal accelerator. Big companies with little companies in pilots. When they see pilots scaling, that’s a good sign. How do you navigate startups working with Corporates early? If startups need product and market and aren’t established, it’s tough to partner with corporates. Have to be ready for the relationship. Accelerators can provide the right interface with deal terms and expectations. Corporate Venture Capital - pros and cons. What’s the exchange of value becomes very important - Data, customers, co-marketing. Corporates work more slowly than startups. Future Trends Companies are starting to take a portfolio approach to everything they do. Building ventures organically - internal or external. Separating themselves from the core, or having an accelerator and investing in startups or co-creation. Not all will win but gives a nice balance. Difficult to disrupt when incentivized to keep core going. Must do everything, a balance. Don’t innovate on your own. Inorganic and organic. How do you streamline processes in working with startups? For More Information For more information or to connect with Ben Yoskovitz, check out Highline BETA. Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play. FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

How did financial industry startup Rocket Dollar achieve double-digit month-over-month growth in the highly competitive financial services industry? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Rocket Dollar co-founder Thomas Young shares details on the marketing strategy that helped this scrappy startup take on the 800-pound gorillas of the financial industry and quickly grow into a household name within two years of the company's launch. The great thing about Thomas's approach is that it doesn't require a huge budget and is something that any company - in any industry - can use to get results.  Highlights from my conversation with Thomas include: Rocket Dollar sells self-directed 401(k) and IRA accounts for anyone that wants to invest their retirement savings outside of stocks and bonds. The biggest use case is investing in multifamily real estate, venture funds or directly into startups in a way that is tax-protected. The company is a startup in the financial services industry, which is highly competitive and has very large, established players with enormous marketing budgets. Rocket Dollar had to overcome several challenges, one of which was people concerned that the company would not be around in a few years. In addition, they had to fight the perception amongst their target audience that people should be very conservative with their retirement savings and invest only in the traditional, established brokerage houses. Thomas has found that the best medium through which Rocket Dollar can address the challenges it is facing is email, so Thomas's goal in the beginning was always to get someone's email address. One way the company got traction in the beginning was by building upon the personal brands of its founders and focusing specifically on winning its local market in Austin, TX. The team that founded Rocket Dollar knew that differentiation would be key to the company's success, so everything from the company name, to the colors used in the branding and the design of the website is deliberately different than the rest of the financial services industry. Another way they differentiated was through messaging. While the rest of the self directed investing community was using anti-Wall Street messaging, Rocket Dollar channeled a more positive outlook that resonated well with its audience. The Rocket Dollar team knew that it would be essential to build trust with their audience, so they made a concerted effort to personalize the way they marketed, from sending emails directly from a founder rather than a corporate catch-all address, to including their faces on the website, etc. When they were ready to really turn on lead generation, the team used paid search to connect with prospects who were ready to buy. They did this by purchasing ads targeting long tail, high intent keywords that the bigger industry players were ignoring. This approach resulted in approximately half of the company's new contacts coming from its paid search efforts. When a new contact lands on the website, the primary CTA they are faced with is "get started," which is basically an immediate sign up for the product. Anyone who doesn't complete the sign up process is put into a lead nurturing workflow and subscribed to the company's newsletter. They have found that staying top of mind works very well for them, whereas anything that smacks of a hard sell really backfires because it jeopardizes the trust they've built with their audience. The team has invested heavily in creating educational content that it can share via email, and the result is that the company's unsubscribe rate is below a half a percent. Whereas 50% of the company's business comes from its pay-per-click marketing efforts, the other 50% is split evenly between leads from channel partners and customer referrals. Rocket Dollar has grown considerably in the last two years and now has customers in all 50 states, $75 million worth of IRA assets in its accounts, and grow in the double digits month over month. Thomas's advice for other startups that are competing in crowded markets is to win your backyard first, focus on getting email addresses (so you don't have to pay for access to your audience), and pay attention to the little things (make sure your marketing is very buttoned-up). Thomas also recommends leveraging the personal brands of your leadership team.  Resources from this episode: Visit the Rocket Dollar website Connect with Thomas on LinkedIn Follow Thomas on Twitter Contact Thomas by email at thomas@rocketdollar.com Get $100 off the setup fee on a new Rocket Dollar account using the code INBOUNDSUCCESS100 Listen to the podcast to get all the details on how Thomas and the Rocket Dollar team structured a marketing plan that enabled them to take on the giants of the financial industry and achieve double-digit month over month growth. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and today my guest is Thomas Young, who's the co-founder and VP of marketing at Rocket Dollar. Welcome, Thomas. Thomas Young (Guest): Thanks, Kathleen. Thanks for having me. Thomas and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: You have an interesting background because you formerly were an agency guy that used to work with financial services firms, but now you're actually the co-founder and VP of marketing in-house at a financial services firm. Can you talk a little bit more about your journey and your story, and also Rocket Dollar and what it is? About Thomas and Rocket Dollar Thomas: Sure. Yeah. So, my journey, it's been pretty fun and pretty fast-paced. Just right out of college, I kind of jumped into the startup ecosystem here in Austin, and my natural focus just sort of shifted to marketing, sort of accidentally. It was kind of the area that resonated the most with me. I graduated from UT Austin with an economics degree that helps in what I do today, but really, my focus and my sort of passion is marketing. I was working full-time at another company where one of the partners of that company also ran a financial advisory business sort of on the side and asked me if I could help her with some just very basic funnel stuff, everything from running Facebook ads to email marketing, just sort of seeing if we could learn together. It turns out I really enjoyed my time doing that, and so through her network I started getting more and more freelance clients, to the point where I basically quit my day job and focused full-time on this agency freelancing, and what I would do is just kind of run the project and then hire other contractors on Upwork or Fiverr or whatever to sort of help me with the heavy lifting. I really enjoyed doing that, and it was fun to market challenging products, which financial products are always challenging to market, and they're expensive to market, and so you have to get really crafty and creative, which I really enjoyed. In the sort of process of doing that, I came across this product that Rocket Dollar sells, which I'll get into in a sec, and I really didn't like the way it was being done by other companies, and I knew that just being in Austin and being in this space, that there was tech play here, and that this was a product that I really liked, that resonates with not only me, but with a lot of people, a lot of different investors. When I met my co-founders, we kind of decided that it was kind of a no-brainer to do this, because I knew the product, I knew the marketing, and my co-founders know the tech. So, it was just a very natural fit, and it came together really fast. So, what Rocket Dollar does is we sell self-directed 401(k) and IRA accounts for basically anyone with an IRA or a 401(k) that wants to invest their retirement savings outside of stocks and bonds. So, the biggest sort of use case that we have is you set up a Rocket Dollar IRA, and then you can go invest in multifamily real estate, or you can invest in a venture fund or directly into a startup, and it's all tax-advantaged, all tax-protected. So, any gains, for example, if you invest in the next Facebook as an angel with your IRA, you'll never pay taxes on it. We simply set up the structure of the account. We help you track your investments across whatever asset class, and then we service the account on the reporting side to the IRS. So, in a nutshell, that's what Rocket Dollar does, and I've been fortunate enough to not only be in on the ground floor, but also continue marketing this product that I really enjoy. David v. Goliath: How Rocket Dollar tool on the big players in the financial services industry Kathleen: Interesting. So, you alluded to this when you were talking about what led you to Rocket Dollar. It's obviously in the financial services industry. I too have had some experience with that at the agency level and know that it's incredibly competitive. There are a bunch of 800-pound gorillas in the industry, and that have really deep pockets, that can throw a ton of money behind the keywords they want to get found for. There are a lot of players, sheer numbers. So, coming in as a relatively new player in the industry that has a business model that is intended to be a high-growth model, yes, it's a tech play, but it's SaaS, essentially. It just happens to be in financial services. How do you wrap your brain around... You're going to have to grow this company a lot, and a lot of that growth is going to have to come through marketing, because this isn't an enterprise sales team pounding the pavement. I mean, I don't even know where to start. Talk me through how you begin taking on those Goliaths. Thomas: Sure. Well, it is challenging, and it's a lot of fun, but basically, what we started at the beginning is we knew that we were going to have to overcome several things. One is we're asking people to trust us with their retirement savings as a startup. So, the question, what happens if you're not here in two years, or in three years, or in five years, that question came up a lot in the first year of Rocket Dollar, and it scared a lot of people. So, that was one that we had to overcome. The second one was it's a completely new way of thinking about your retirement savings, something that you've been learning about since you were probably... Most people hear the word IRA from their parents when they're growing up, and the indoctrination of Fidelity and Schwab and Vanguard is strong, that this is money that is completely sacred, that you can't touch, that you can't do anything with, so just give it to us and let us fee you from now until you're 60, and that's strong for a lot of people. So, you have to overcome that. Then yeah, just getting any sort of bandwidth in that space, we have to be really creative with our lead gen, and then also with how we approach, for example, paid search on Google. I mean, it's so expensive when you knock up against certain keywords, and then it just drops off on other ones. So, we've been really creative there. The way that I think about it is if I can get to an email, then I can build that trust, because now I can communicate sort of one-on-one with that potential customer, with that consumer in a really cheap way, and then take my time building that trust. I'm not trying to sell you today. I'm not trying to sell you tomorrow. I just want to make sure that this is a good fit, and the best medium for us to be able to do that has been email. Then the other thing that we did just from the very beginning was try to win Austin. We're based in Austin. Our founders are known here. So, we each had a personal brand, if you will, and we really leveraged that in order to get Rocket Dollar sort of off the ground, and then just letting that sort of goodwill that we built up in Austin spread organically throughout the state, and then traveling to different conferences, making sure that we were there, that we were very present, very available, and that helped us a lot in the first year. It was not a lot of digital marketing, and a lot of face-to-face interactions, which I think really helped us out. Kathleen: I can appreciate that, though. I used to have an agency, and I live in Annapolis, Maryland, which is not a huge market. This is where my agency was, and I remember any time there came an opportunity that involved doing marketing for one of the small number of really large companies here in Annapolis, I was like, "We have to win this, because it's in our backyard." You have to win your backyard first, first and second and last. Right? You have to win at home if you're going to have any hope of winning everywhere else, because it's the friendliest market, and it's a great place to test out and kind of hone your messaging and your strategy. So, I can very much appreciate that approach. Now, did it really start with how you positioned the brand? I mean, is that kind of the first step, given that you're in this crowded marketplace? Why differentiation was key Thomas: Well, yeah, and one of the things that we knew that we needed to do was be a little bit different. The name Rocket Dollar is, in and of itself, different from some of these agencies, or some of these companies, I'm sorry, that are named after these titans, J.P. Morgan and Charles Schwab and these... We knew we needed a little bit of a different angle, and we needed to be just interesting enough to pique a little bit of curiosity. So, we did that. So, just beginning from the name, beginning from our approach to how we build our website, and just the tone that we took, it all sort of came together pretty organically, just because of the way we are as the founding team, but it was very conscious to not be, for example, another blue and white or green financial services company. We threw out the purple, and everybody thought we were crazy, and we got a lot of pushback, and now it's kind of just our thing. Kathleen: Yeah, can you actually... I want to dig into that a little bit, because this is something that I've run into myself. I used to, for example, do a lot of work with law firms, and there was one law firm I worked with, and I was like, "Everybody else is going forest green. You need to go left when they go right." You do get a lot of pushback because it's like, well, everybody else is doing it this way. So, I don't know if it's a fear-based reaction or what, but can you talk me through that decision-making process, and how did you get consensus around that? Thomas: Well, luckily for us, there was only two of us in the room at the time when we decided, so it wasn't this big... We were sitting in a conference room of another startup that Henry, my co-founder, was a board member of, and so they used to lend us this conference room with a whiteboard so we could sort of sketch out our ideas. We were on, I think it was Fiverr or Upwork or something, getting our sort of first logo made after we decided on the name, and we got this huge swath of different ones and different logo. One of them was purple, and Henry was like, "That sort of speaks to me," and I saw it, and I was... "Well, it's the one that stands out the most. These other ones look like regular financial services' boring logos, and I really like that purple." , we kind of just decided right there in about 15 seconds that we were going to have purple as our primary color. Then when we went out to investors, and when we built our first pitch decks, and when we hired our first employees, everybody just... They didn't really like it, and then now it's just a thing, and everybody knows us as the purple guys in Austin, and it just very naturally became our thing. Kathleen: But how did you make the decision to stick with it in the face of VCs and others who were saying, "We don't like this purple. It doesn't work"? Thomas: Probably mostly sheer stubbornness, to be completely honest with you. I think we just got attached to it, and the pushback wasn't all negative. There were some people that really liked that approach. So, we heard both sides of it, and we just decided that we were going to stick with our guns. I liked it as a marketer because it would just let me be a little bit different. On every conference that we went to, our logo is going to be a little bit different than everybody else. Everything we sponsor, it's just going to pop a little bit more. So, from a branding angle it was really easy... I really liked it just because it was easy to see, quite simply. There wasn't a whole lot of extra thought, whether purple means anything, or whether it stands for anything. I mean, I know that it does, but- Kathleen: Yeah. I think it stands for royalty, so maybe that means that you guys will be the kings of the industry someday. Thomas: Well, that's what we're going for. That's what we should've told the VCs instead of the fact that- Kathleen: There you go. Thomas: But no, it just happened very sort of naturally. Kathleen: In hindsight, do you think that taking that deliberately kind of different approach to visual branding helped set you apart? Thomas: I think so. I think it got us just that first little bit of mind share. The name as well, Rocket Dollar doesn't really convey that we're in the retirement industry, that we're selling IRA and 401(k) accounts, so I think that sort of piqued curiosity at the beginning, too, and Henry, our CEO and my co-founder, he had a company prior that was sold to Goldman Sachs called Honest Dollar, and they did very small business... It was a tech play on small business retirement accounts for businesses with less than 10 employees, that getting a 401(k) plan is very expensive. It was that, and so they exited, and it was a good win for them. So, Rocket Dollar was just kind of the natural progression. Now you can take a little more risk with your money, and so rocket it. I think we decided at 2:00 in the morning that we liked that named and... Kathleen: When all great names are developed. Right? Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Kathleen: I think in the case of my business, it was very late at night over a bottle of wine. Thomas: Yeah. There was a couple of cocktails involved, and we bought the domain on his phone at 2:00 in the morning for like $1,800, and that was just it from that day forward. Audience research and product development Kathleen: Awesome. So, you established the name. You got the visual branding. What came next? Thomas: So, at that point we started really just focusing on product, and so we weren't really thinking about the marketing in a traditional sense. Even though I'm a marketer, I was pretty heads-down with our product team, just building what the MVP was going to look like. So, during that time, we also had the ability to sit down with a lot of people around Austin and sort of generate that first sort of list before we launched. So, we really just focused on product, and then on just communicating with our stakeholders, and we did the classic "download your email list off of LinkedIn," and just start communicating what you're doing, seeing if there's interest, asking questions, sitting down with a lot of potential customers in Austin. The coffee shop across the street, by the end of those two or three months, they already knew to have our coffees ready. So, we just talked to a lot of people and asked them what part of our product resonated, what part scared them, what part they were excited about, and really focused on getting our messaging through that, listening to people that I'd sold these accounts to prior, that I knew were customers of the last company that I worked for, and also people that just were interested in sitting down with us. So, it was just really kind of a month-long listening campaign, if you will, to sort of determine what our voice was going to be. For example, a lot of people in this specific niche are very anti-Wall Street, and so they take a very negative tone, a very anti-government tone, very fear-based tone that resonates with a certain audience, and it works because I've sold these accounts that way before. I didn't want to be that company with that tone and that negativity, and so it was really more about building an empowerment sort of message and sort of a... This is going to sound really cheesy, but a "reach for the stars with your retirement dollars" message, and that resonated really well with everyone I talked to, not just people that would've liked the anti-Wall Street or people that really thought that this was too risky, but they liked that tone. So, once I heard that enough, I knew that that was sort of going to be our voice for when we started going outside of our little bubble in Austin, and it's worked. We get really good feedback on how we approach our messaging. Kathleen: It's really interesting that you bring up that choice of taking a fear-based or a positive approach to messaging. I've done some research into this, and I've been fascinated by it, and there's a lot of data from particularly the public health space, that while fear-based messaging can work, positive messaging that taps into positive emotions is so much more effective, especially over the longterm. It goes back to antismoking campaigns, and I think it's really interesting because right now we're kind of coming full circle where they're using these pictures of people with tracheotomies and disfigured faces to try to convince people not to smoke. The most effective antismoking campaign was the Truth campaign, and it's because they realized that if you want to keep kids from starting to smoke, the whole reason they start to smoke has nothing to do with them not understanding the health implications. It has everything to do with them wanting to rebel against their parents. So, if you make it, "Hey, rebel against Big Tobacco that's trying to control you," then they're like, "Yeah, I'm going to stick it to Big Tobacco and not smoke." That actually worked, as opposed to, "You're going to get black lung disease. You're going to need to have surgery, et cetera." So, then they did the same thing with heart bypass patients, what got them to make healthy changes over the longterm, and it was all more positive messaging. So, it's just interesting from a marketing standpoint that so many industries continue to use the fear-based messaging, I think because it is kind of easier, but I don't know, what my observation has been, that the ones that tap into the more positive stuff, those are the companies and the brands that actually build the most loyal following over the longterm, because that's what people really climb onto, and they want to be a part of a movement. Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. Even at its most basic level, it's just who we are as people, the people that work at Rocket Dollar. So, I'm kind of Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky. I come into the office with a big stupid smile on my face every day, and I'm not good at fear marketing because that's just not who I am. Building trust through personalization Thomas: So, it was also really easy for us to take this tone, just because it's our natural sort of way of existing, and I think that having that sort of authenticity early in our marketing, well, early and to this day, really helps us because it's very clear that there's people at the other end of our emails and of our messaging. I mean, I sign our emails. Our marketing emails, I sign them personally, or Henry does, or somebody does, because we want to make sure that there's people. We plaster our faces on our own website all over the place so that you can see who you're interacting with, who you're talking to on the phone, who is running the company that you're trusting with your retirement dollars. I mean, all of that is really important, especially in the retirement space when you're going up against these big brands like Fidelity or Charles Schwab or whatever. Kathleen: Yeah. I love that, that whole concept of personalizing it to transfer the trust. Getting into the audience's email inbox Kathleen: From what I understand, the company is under two years old, and it sounds like you spent the better part of the first year really developing the product, nailing down the messaging, et cetera, and then you talked about how then it became all about getting into somebody's email inbox. So, can you pick apart for me what approaches have you taken to that, what has worked really well? Because obviously, you're going after a big audience in the post-Austin kind of world. How do you go out to a cold audience and make it into their inbox? Thomas: Sure. Well, it's been fast. I mean, from when we sort of looked outside of Austin to having customers in all 50 states was a couple months. So, it went really fast. So, there is a natural sort of group of people looking for this product, and so at the beginning it was just capturing people that already knew that this was something they wanted to do, and it was going directly after our competitors on paid search, for example, and just capturing sort of the top of the funnel. Well, it would really be the middle of the funnel, because they already were aware. They were already educated. It was just a decision-making process. So, we were really good at capturing those people because the other people in this space, frankly, are just a little bit behind us on the tech and on the cost and all that, so it was pretty easy. Kathleen: Wait. Now, can you explain that a little bit? Because I think that's easy to say, but this is a challenge a lot of people have. This is an industry where your competitors are very well established. I'm sure the bid price for the keywords is really high. So, how exactly did you beat them at the paid search game? Thomas: Sure. Well, it was actually just going a little bit on longer-tail keywords, because the Charles Schwabs, the Fidelitys, they don't do exactly what we do, in that they don't sell you an account that allows you to invest in real estate or in stocks and bonds. So, whenever we go a little bit deeper into the keywords, the volume's actually much lower, and the keywords are much cheaper. So, if we were just bidding IRA, and then you're going to get all the big boys, and that's going to be a $15, $20 keyword. I mean, it's going to be ridiculous. Kathleen: Did you go after that at all, those short-tail keywords? Thomas: No, no. We couldn't afford it at all. The people that are searching for that are thinking about a Charles Schwab or a Fidelity account anyways. That's what they want. They want the stocks and bonds. But when you go a little bit further, then there's the people looking for, "Well, can I do real estate in an IRA? Can I do startups in an IRA, or investing in cryptocurrency through an IRA?" So, then you get to those, and yeah, the volume is lower, but the price is also lower, and frankly, it was more than we could handle. We weren't ready to scale and hit hundreds of accounts a month or thousands of accounts a month. So, it was good for us to be able to test that sort of slowly before really pouring gasoline on the fire. It was also a more educated audience because they knew that they wanted a self-directed account, and then we weren't going up against Charles Schwab. We were going up against Pensco Trust Company or Equity Trust, or some of these that as soon as you see their reviews online, it's pretty clear that we're going to just beat them on customer service, which is really where we do beat a lot of these people at, and our price point is significantly lower because, like you mentioned earlier, we're a SaaS play, not a service company. Kathleen: So, what percentage of your new contacts comes from paid search, roughly? Thomas: Probably about half. Kathleen: Okay. So, these people convert on an ad. They get into your database, and then you're putting them into email drip flows. Is that right? Thomas: Yeah. I mean, someone comes to our site, and we don't really have just plain lead captures. We really just have a signup button, and so that's our first lead gen, basically, tool. At that point, if they do not finish buying an account, then they come into sort of a short-term nurture that then turns into a long-term nurture after about a month, and then it goes into a newsletter list. So, we've found that if people... Because of the sort of mid-funnel group that we're really heavily going after in the paid search, they're already aware, they're already educated, if they don't convert within three days, it's going to be... They will convert. A percentage of them does convert, and it's a high percentage. It's going to be probably a month to three later, and that's simply because whenever you buy an account from us, you self-direct your money. So, if they don't have an investment in mind, they don't set up the account until they knew what they're going to do. So then really, it's just about staying top of mind in this space so that whenever something does come across that they want to do, it's just an automatic reaction that, "Hey, those Rocket Dollar guys, I'll just go set up my account there. It'll be easy, cheap, whatever, and then I'll make my investment." So, I'm really just more focused on staying sort of relevant, providing value, talking about the space, talking about different investment types, and then people convert naturally once they decide it's something to do. The thing that really does not work well for us is the hard sell, because people, the minute you start trying to do a hard sell on a retirement account, people lose trust, and then it's just very transactional, and it's not really... You lose, and we found that out pretty early. So, it's just providing content, being top of mind, staying in touch, and people convert naturally. Email lead nurturing Kathleen: Is there something you're doing in those email nurture sequences or in your newsletter to really keep people engaged? Because I do find for myself at least, if I show that initial interest, I convert on something, but if it is that two-to-three-month period, and I'm not ready to sign up, I get very highly likely to unsubscribe unless something is really, really delivering value, because I don't like my inbox being cluttered by things that are not really worth it. Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely, and I'm the same way. One of the big investments that we've made is on educational content. So, we share a lot of blogs, a lot of webinars that we're on sometimes. We've launched our own podcast that's growing pretty quickly. So, I think as long as we provide educational content and really go for those light bulb moments with people where, "Oh, I didn't know that. That's cool. Let's see what comes next week or next month or whatever," as long as we share something that resonates and a little bit of a longer form, not just get a hundred dollars off emails. Those are really annoying. But we spend a lot of time and energy creating content that we think will resonate. Our unsubscribe rate is below half a percent, so it's really working, and we write about what we're reading or learning in that moment. So, it really kind of happens organically, what we choose to share, especially in our newsletters. Our nurture emails are a little bit more permanent. We don't edit them that much. But our newsletter and our blog is really just sort of what the team is interested in that week. So, that's worked, and I think we'll continue to do that. Channel marketing and referrals Kathleen: Now, you mentioned about half of your new contacts come from pay-per-click. Where does the other half come from? Thomas: Yeah. So, the other half, we spend a lot of time with partners, so people that are raising money for their own projects. So, it could be anybody from a real estate investor raising a small syndicate fund to an entrepreneur that's raising a fund, or that's raising money for their own startup, or there are some bigger partners. So, for example, Gemini in the crypto world, Fundrise, sort of these investment platforms, we go to them and say, "Hey, to tap into another pool of funds, did you know that people can invest in you through an IRA? Send them to us. We'll set up the account for them, and then you get their money as an investor." So, that's worked really well for us, too, on the brand-building side because these trusted sources are referring us business because we're taking care of their investors. As long as we continue to take care of other people's investors, we really win there. That, I would say, is about 25% of our business. Then the other 25% of our business is customer referrals. So, our own customers are telling people about us, and that's working really well. We do have a referral campaign that kicks off about 60 days after someone purchases, make sure that their account's funded, that they've made an investment, at which point we do circle back and say, "Hey, if there's anybody in your audience that you think would be interested in this, here's some material that you can share. We'd really appreciate it." The cool thing about these accounts is that it's, I think, the only retirement account that people talk about with their friends over the dinner table because they feel really smart when they bought a rental property with their IRA. So, it's natural that our customers share it, and it's... Yeah. That accounts for about 25% of our business, is just our referral campaign. Kathleen: Yeah. It's a lot more interesting than saying, "Yes, I am 30% invested in a low-risk bond fund." No, no, no. I don't want to hear about that. Customer Facebook group Thomas: Yeah. No, it's definitely something that people like to talk about. We have a really great customer-only Facebook group where people talk about what they're doing, where people share ideas, where people ask us questions. So, our team is in there moderating it all the time, and it's kind of the, "Oh, you don't have anything to do for an hour? Let's go check what's happening in the Facebook group." People are sharing some really cool stories. So, we market that a little bit, where you get access to this investor group. So, people like that education, and that group sort of sparks creativity for a lot of our customers, and I think that that really has been a good thing for us to do. Kathleen: That's interesting, because I guess... Correct me if I'm wrong, but are there many other companies like yours or in the industry that are tapping into Facebook groups? I don't get the sense that there are. Thomas: In my experience, no, and I've bought accounts from most of our competitors, just testing out their processes, seeing what's going on and what's not, what they're doing well, what they're not doing well, and then comparing it to what we're doing well and not well, and no, I've never been invited to a Facebook group. Kathleen: Yeah. It's also interesting, too, because... This could be my lack of knowledge speaking, but from the limited knowledge I have of marketing in the financial industry, you have FINRA and SEC guidance on what you can and cannot say yourself, but I imagine in the Facebook group your customers can say anything, pretty much. Is that right? Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, they can anything they'd like, and they do. But one of the advantages that we have is as a... I mean, technically we are a third-party administrator, so we are really handling paperwork. We're not advising. We're not investing. We're not touching money. So, we have a little bit more leeway in what we can say than a traditional financial services company. I mean, we cannot advise, but we can... Most of our customers aren't looking for us to advise. What they're looking for is if we come across a deal that we think they'd be interested in, a lot of times we'll share just if we have a personal relationship with that customer, which a lot of times we develop that relationship, and we can speak to the legality of whether it's an allowed transaction with the IRA, because that's a pretty clear yes/no. That's sort of where we keep it, but we'll talk about... If I make an investment through mine, I'll post it in the Facebook group and say, "Hey, I thought this was cool. I did it. If anybody else wants to participate, there it is." So, it's pretty crazy how much money moves around just off of those little posts that we put on that group. Our partners, luckily for us, are realizing that we're tapping into almost 10 trillion dollars worth of IRA money, and that there's some significant funds there for their projects. What makes Rocket Dollar's channel marketing strategy successful Kathleen: That's interesting. So, the partners interest me because I've talked with a number of different people on this podcast about channel marketing strategies, and I think this sounds like a channel marketing strategy, but with a twist. Fair to say that that's really what it is? Thomas: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, we market directly to partners to try to get them in our... I mean, we have a whole separate funnel for partners and a whole separate section of the website for our partners where they can learn about raising money through IRAs with the goal really being of them referring us customers. What we tell them is, "Hey, look. It's available. You don't have to know all that much about it. You have to know that you can do it. Send them to us. We'll educate them. We'll let them know what needs to happen. You don't need to work that hard. Let us work hard, and then the end result is that you get your deals funded faster, and your investors will be taken care of." Kathleen: It's funny that you put it that way because I've been actually a reseller, a value-added reseller in a number of channel programs, and when I talk with people about what I think, at least from that side of the equation, makes a great reseller program, it is the programs that make your life really easy as the reseller. So, I was a HubSpot partner for 11 years, and they have an amazing partner program, and it's because they make your life so easy. They spoonfeed you white-labeled content. Here's 10 emails you can use to nurture people. They put you through sales training. Literally, you can't almost fail, and that makes it such an appealing program to be a part of, and it sounds kind of like that's the same approach you've taken here. Any thoughts on what it is that has made your partner program so successful? Thomas: Well, I think at the end of the day it's that it gets... I mean, they're not even resellers. It just gets their deals funded faster. So, it's a true win-win. We get a customer, and they get money into their deals. So, it's not even that... It's just a tool for them to make their life easier, so it's like... The easiest way to put it is if they have to work less and I'm saving them time, and they're just getting their money faster. I mean, it's just really that simple for us, and we're not paying our partners. Maybe we'll give them a discount, but it's really just... We'll make your life easier if you refer us business. Kathleen: Yeah, that is huge. Thomas: Yeah, yeah. It's pretty simple, but it's powerful. Rocket Dollar's growth Kathleen: So, can you share anything about the company's growth in the last two years, and kind of where you are right now as opposed to when you started? Thomas: Yeah. So, like I mentioned earlier, we've really sort of grown in 2019, is really when poured a little bit of fuel on the fire. We have customers in all 50 states now. We've got somewhere around $75 million worth of IRA assets in Rocket Dollar accounts. Right now, we're really sort of continuing to grow in the double digits month over month, so it's going really well. Then we're really focusing again on our channel partners, but some of the bigger ones. So, we're going after the big players, the YieldStreets of the world, the Crunchbases of the... Or Crunchbase. I'm sorry, Coinbase, the Coinbases of the world, where it's really a mega strategy where it's not five or 10 accounts. It's a thousand to 5,000 accounts, and really hooking in to their APIs with our own so that it's just a seamless experience for them and for their customers to get into their deals with IRA dollars. So, that's really sort of what's on the roadmap, and then we are also launching, about halfway through next year, a robo advisor so that if you don't know the alternative deal that you want to participate in, you can have your traditional stocks, bonds, mutual funds, inside of a Rocket Dollar account, so when you are ready to make that investment, your money's all right there, and you don't have to set up the account, or when you exit an investment, you don't have to transfer again to Vanguard or to Schwab. You can just do it all inside Rocket Dollar. So, we're really sort of pursuing the whole account versus just the amount that you're going to use to buy that rental house instead of transferring... If it's a hundred-thousand-dollar house, people are transferring a hundred-thousand dollars over to us, we'd rather them just bring over the whole thing and have everything in one account. So, that's really our product roadmap for the next six months to a year. What does it take for a startup to succeed in a highly competitive market? Kathleen: That makes sense. Now, if somebody is listening and they have a startup, and they're in the same situation you were two years ago, where they're entering a market that's very crowded, that has some very well funded incumbents, can you sort of boil down to two or three things that you think, based on your experience, are essential to do to be successful in that situation? Thomas: Yeah. I think number one is win your building, win your block, win your zip code, win your city slowly, and it's a lot of manual or in-person interactions. It's really getting yourself out there, and then your company sort of follows. I think that's number one, because you're not going to win on Google. You're not going to win on Facebook. You're not going to win on Instagram, because these guys are spending a day what you might raise for your entire seed round. I talk to people, I met with a company the other day, and they said that they haven't turned on their full digital spend. They're only spending $350,000 a month. Kathleen: Oh, amateur hour. Come on. Thomas: Yeah, and that's what I spend in a year. Kathleen: Right. Thomas: Right? You're not going to compete on their turf, so you got to be creative and come up with your own turf. For us, it was winning Austin, and your goal being not selling an account, but getting an email address, and that way we could continue to communicate with you without having to pay for it, if you will, because I can write copy, and I can write emails, and so it was really just finding the cheapest way to talk to people, and for us it was email. The other thing is we really focused on the little things, on appearing very buttoned up, on punctuation, on editing, on grammar, on spelling, everything that you don't really think about, but the minute someone sees a typo on an email from a financial services brand, you've lost because you can't be making those mistakes if you want to talk about someone's retirement. Kathleen: Right. If we can't trust you with our commas, how are we going to trust you with our dollars? Thomas: Exactly. Exactly. So, those two things for us were very sort of fundamental, is winning Austin, and then just focusing on the little things, like spending the extra hour to edit a blog post, or spending the extra 30 minutes to lay out the email perfect, and those little things really added up for us. We're still doing them. I mean, it's still a huge focus for us. We're still trying to win trust. We're still trying to win mind share. So, everything that we did in year one we're still doing. Kathleen: Now, just to digress for a second, you mentioned something that we really didn't touch on, which is putting yourself out there. I think you briefly mentioned it earlier, personal brands. I think there are probably a lot of founders who are technically very savvy about the product they're building. They're very passionate about it. But I've met many who are very reluctant to put themselves out there. Any advice as far as how to do it, why to do it, and what impact it's had on the business? Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. We've been lucky that two of our three founders are very extroverted. Henry and I are comfortable in front of crowds, and Rick, who's our third co-founder and our CTO, is also very comfortable with people, and he's very technical. So, we got very lucky that we have three founders that are very willing to grab a microphone. It really doesn't faze us all that much. Henry already had a pretty strong personal brand in Austin because of his prior exits, because of his work in the 401(k) space for... He set up probably a couple hundred 401(k)s for different businesses around Austin, so he was very well known. To be completely honest with you, I struggle with the whole concept of personal brands because it's not really my forte to really promote me. I'd rather promote the brand. So, it was something that I had to learn, but I think it's just practice and getting out there, and taking every opportunity that you can to grab a microphone, to speak, to talk about your company, and you don't even have to talk about yourself. Just talk about your company, because that's what you're passionate about, and that's what you know, and that's what resonates with people. Start with your audience. Start with your people. Right? If you're very technical, go to technical meetups and practice there, and then just grow slowly, and you'll get more and more comfortable just by sheer process of repetition. Kathleen: I love it. That's great advice for, I think, really anybody who's trying to build a company, whether they're the founder, the head of marketing, the head of sales, et cetera. Thomas: Absolutely. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Well, I don't want to finish without asking you the two questions that I always ask all my guests. Thomas: Sure. Kathleen: We talk a lot about inbound marketing on The Inbound Success Podcast, so is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now with that? Thomas: You know, I hesitated to say this because we talk about them so much, but I was having a conversation with our account manager at HubSpot a couple months ago, and they really kill it. They've actually recently stopped having any sort of outbound sales at all. They are only inbound now, which I thought was risky and also amazing. I mean, they must be doing it so well to be able to take that big of a bet on- Kathleen: I'm convinced it's because their database has every single person on the planet earth in it. Thomas: Oh, yeah. No, they know... Kathleen: Yeah. Thomas: No, I think they're doing it really well, and it's obvious that they're still accelerating, and they're still growing. I mean, we're on HubSpot. I love HubSpot. I'm a huge fan. Their educational content, it's fantastic. I think that they really are doing a really good job. Kathleen: Okay, and then second question, one of the biggest things I hear from marketers that I speak to is that things are changing so quickly. Digital marketing is like drinking from a fire hose. How do you personally, as the head of marketing and a co-founder at Rocket Dollar, how do you stay up-to-date on everything? Thomas: Well, I'm sure like a lot of other guests, I read almost everything. I spend a lot of time... I love Medium.com. They have some really good publications. There's one called Better Marketing that is fantastic. It has really good content. So, I'm on Medium a lot. I read a lot of just news and a lot of sort of industry... The CMO section of The Wall Street Journal I think is fantastic, just because it's all relevant and timely. Then there's three books that have really spoken to me that have been fantastic, and one of them is called Don't Make Me Think, and it's all about user behavior online and why some things work and why some don't, and A/B testing and all that. It's pretty in the weeds, but it's fantastic. Another one is Lean Analytics. It's fantastic. It's very dense. It's like a textbook, but if you can get through that, you'll come out the other side just really able to sort of mix the creative and the analytical bit that's really important for marketers. I mean, the part that drew me to marketing was the numbers as much as the creativity, and I really like that balance. So, Lean Analytics is a great one if you're heavy creative and need some analytics help. Then there's a third that's really just a guide. It's called The Art of Digital Marketing. It's a big, thick book that's fantastic. So, those three, I think you could definitely get freelance clients just if you read those three. You could start working and marketing, and then just staying up-to-date with when Facebook changes their algorithms or when Google changes their bid process or whatever. That's just the sort of in the weeds stuff. But yeah, I would say Medium.com and those three books. Kathleen: I love those suggestions. Yeah. Those are three books that I have not heard people mention on here before, so I will definitely check those out. If you're listening and you want to find all those things, of course I'll put the links in the show notes, so head there to get ahold of those. How to connect with Thomas or learn more about Rocket Dollar Kathleen: If somebody wants to learn more about Rocket Dollar or wants to connect with you and ask a question, what's the best way for them to do that? Thomas: Yeah. So, I set this up for this podcast, but if you go to rocketdollar.com/inboundsuccess, we can talk there, and then also, I set it up, just if anybody is interested in one of these accounts, we'll knock a hundred bucks off the setup fee if you use INBOUNDSUCCESS100 at checkout. And then if you want to reach me personally, my email is thomas@rocketdollar.com. So, feel free to reach out. I mean, I stay on top of that, and I'm pretty open on it. So, that's really the easiest way to get to me. Kathleen: Great. Again, I'll put all those links in the show notes, so head there if you want to take advantage of any of those opportunities. You know what to do next... If you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learned something new, leave the podcast a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. That helps us a lot get in front of new listeners. And of course, if you know somebody else doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork, because they could be my next interview. Thanks so much, Thomas. Thomas: Cool. Thank you, Kathleen. I really enjoyed it.

Find the interview and all show notes here: https://www.startuprad.io/interviews/ult-holds-the-us-patent-for-a-universal-translator/ In this interview, we continue our interview series from Aufschwung-Messe in the Frankfurt Stock Exchange building. In this 4th interview we are talking to Reginald Dalce (https://www.linkedin.com/in/reginald-dalce-935b9164/), CEO and Founder of Universal Language Translator ULT (https://ult-speaks.com/). They are working on an already functioning translation app, which translates one natural language to another natural language. Right now, they are looking for investors to keep working on an API to get their vocabulary translated for specific areas e.g. medicine, engineering and so forth. Reginald carries around a US Patent, which he holds for his software: https://ult-speaks.com/160 Affiliated Links GlobalUSAEuropeGermanyCo-WorkingWeWorkWeWorkWeWorkWeWorkMarketing / SEO / Graphics / Sounds and moreFiverrFiverrFiverrFiverrEmail service?G-SuiteG-SuiteG-SuiteG-Suite Books we likeIntroduction to Venture Capital Introduction to Venture CapitalIntroduction to Venture CapitalIntroduction to Venture Capital LEAN: Ultimate Collection - Lean Startup, Lean Analytics, Lean Enterprise, Kaizen, Six Sigma, Agile Project Management, Kanban, ScrumLEAN: Ultimate Collection - Lean Startup, Lean Analytics, Lean Enterprise, Kaizen, Six Sigma, Agile Project Management, Kanban, ScrumLEAN: Ultimate Collection - Lean Startup, Lean Analytics, Lean Enterprise, Kaizen, Six Sigma, Agile Project Management, Kanban, ScrumLEAN: Ultimate Collection - Lean Startup, Lean Analytics, Lean Enterprise, Kaizen, Six Sigma, Agile Project Management, Kanban, Scrum How To Launch a Startup: An easy to understand 9-step guide to make your startup idea a real businessHow To Launch a Startup: An easy to understand 9-step guide to make your startup idea a real businessHow To Launch a Startup: An easy to understand 9-step guide to make your startup idea a real businessHow To Launch a Startup: An easy to understand 9-step guide to make your startup idea a real business Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the FutureZero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the FutureZero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the FutureZero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the FutureLearn more about our Affiliated Marketing here: https://www.startuprad.io/blog/affiliate-marketing-at-startuprad-io/ Download the app right here: Apple App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/id1315605912Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dbws.languagetranslator This interview is part of a series of interviews done at the Aufschwung Messe in Frankfurt, one of the large startup and entrepreneur fairs in Germany, with the backing of multiple sponsors and public institutions. You can learn more about the fair here (German only): https://www.aufschwung-messe.de/ and don’t forget the founder of the fair, Burkhard. Burkhard runs one of Germany’s most frequented and renown business blogs, where he introduces his readers to one new business model a day in German, adding up to more than 7.750 in 5.00 days (almost 14 years). Learn more here https://www.best-practice-business.de/ Folge direkt herunterladen

Find the original interview here: https://www.startuprad.io/blog/it-seal-helps-companies-to-train-their-employees-in-cyber-security/ In this interview, we continue our interview series from Aufschwung-Messe in the Frankfurt Stock Exchange building. In this 3rd interview we are talking to David Kelm (https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-kelm-it-seal/), CEO of IT-Seal (Social Engineering Analytics Laboratory https://it-seal.de/), which is a cybersecurity company helping corporates to train their employees in IT security, especially phishing emails. David started out with the company with his master thesis, for which he just wanted to generate quantitative data on social engineering. “We do our research on the dark side” “To be a bad guy, you need to be creative” “Websites like Glassdoor and kununu are really interesting for attackers” “… on your LinkedIn profile, you should not make your contacts publicly available” “At the beginning of the training, the management level klicks the most [on phishing links]” “we are looking for Venture Capital Investors – We are in the middle between Seed and Series A” Affiliated Links GlobalUSAEuropeGermanyCo-WorkingWeWorkWeWorkWeWorkWeWorkMarketing / SEO / Graphics / Sounds and moreFiverrFiverrFiverrFiverrEmail service?G-SuiteG-SuiteG-SuiteG-Suite Books we likeIntroduction to Venture Capital Introduction to Venture CapitalIntroduction to Venture CapitalIntroduction to Venture Capital LEAN: Ultimate Collection - Lean Startup, Lean Analytics, Lean Enterprise, Kaizen, Six Sigma, Agile Project Management, Kanban, ScrumLEAN: Ultimate Collection - Lean Startup, Lean Analytics, Lean Enterprise, Kaizen, Six Sigma, Agile Project Management, Kanban, ScrumLEAN: Ultimate Collection - Lean Startup, Lean Analytics, Lean Enterprise, Kaizen, Six Sigma, Agile Project Management, Kanban, ScrumLEAN: Ultimate Collection - Lean Startup, Lean Analytics, Lean Enterprise, Kaizen, Six Sigma, Agile Project Management, Kanban, Scrum How To Launch a Startup: An easy to understand 9-step guide to make your startup idea a real businessHow To Launch a Startup: An easy to understand 9-step guide to make your startup idea a real businessHow To Launch a Startup: An easy to understand 9-step guide to make your startup idea a real businessHow To Launch a Startup: An easy to understand 9-step guide to make your startup idea a real business Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the FutureZero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the FutureZero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the FutureZero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the FutureLearn more about our Affiliated Marketing here: https://www.startuprad.io/blog/affiliate-marketing-at-startuprad-io/ Find all the Instagram postings from Joe here on our Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/p/BuWQaJAnRHx/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BuWQzeRH8En/ During the interview we talk about: BSI – The German “Federal Office for Information Security” https://www.bsi.bund.de/EN/Home/home_node.htmlWorkers Council https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_council This interview is part of a series of interviews done at the Aufschwung Messe in Frankfurt, one of the large startup and entrepreneur fairs in Germany, with the backing of multiple sponsors and public institutions. You can learn more about the fair here (German only): https://www.aufschwung-messe.de/ and don’t forget the founder of the fair, Burkhard. Burkhard runs one of Germany’s most frequented and renown business blogs, where he introduces his readers to one new business model a day in German, adding up to more than 7.750 in 5.00 days (almost 14 years). Learn more here https://www.best-practice-business.de/ Folge direkt herunterladen

Find all the links to the video and the transcript of the interview here: https://www.startuprad.io/blog/evum-motors-wants-to-bring-emobility-to-sub-saharan-africa/ In this interview, we talk to Dominik Fries (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominik-fries-6b34a662/) the head of business development of the mobility startup Evum Motors (https://www.evum-motors.com/). Evum Motors provides electronic powered vehicles for transportation in rural Africa. The small delivery truck has a range of 100-200km, with all-wheel drive, for a payload of up to one metric ton. The solar panels on top of the drivers' cabin can extend this range by approx. 10 km. Affiliated Links Global USA Europe Germany Co-Working WeWork WeWork WeWork WeWork Marketing / SEO / Graphics / Sounds and more Fiverr Fiverr Fiverr Fiverr Email service? G-Suite G-Suite G-Suite G-Suite Books we like Introduction to Venture Capital Introduction to Venture Capital Introduction to Venture Capital Introduction to Venture Capital LEAN: Ultimate Collection - Lean Startup, Lean Analytics, Lean Enterprise, Kaizen, Six Sigma, Agile Project Management, Kanban, Scrum LEAN: Ultimate Collection - Lean Startup, Lean Analytics, Lean Enterprise, Kaizen, Six Sigma, Agile Project Management, Kanban, Scrum LEAN: Ultimate Collection - Lean Startup, Lean Analytics, Lean Enterprise, Kaizen, Six Sigma, Agile Project Management, Kanban, Scrum LEAN: Ultimate Collection - Lean Startup, Lean Analytics, Lean Enterprise, Kaizen, Six Sigma, Agile Project Management, Kanban, Scrum How To Launch a Startup: An easy to understand 9-step guide to make your startup idea a real business How To Launch a Startup: An easy to understand 9-step guide to make your startup idea a real business How To Launch a Startup: An easy to understand 9-step guide to make your startup idea a real business How To Launch a Startup: An easy to understand 9-step guide to make your startup idea a real business Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future Learn more about our Affiliated Marketing here: https://www.startuprad.io/blog/affiliate-marketing-at-startuprad-io/ The idea of this truck was developed at Technical University Munich, together with local universities in Africa (https://www.acar.tum.de/index.php?id=5&L=0) There are several adaptations of the model, which can be deployed for different purposes (transportation of euro pallet, cooling unit, snow cleaning, medical station, road maintenance, transportation of up to 10 people and much more). You can pre-order here: https://www.evum-motors.com/reservierung/ The car will be available in Africa 2021 and they target Latin America as a next step. Evum Motors is looking for investors for their Series A. This interview is part of a series of interviews done at the Aufschwung Messe in Frankfurt, one of the large startup and entrepreneur fairs in Germany, with the backing of multiple sponsors and public institutions. You can learn more about the fair here (German only): https://www.aufschwung-messe.de/ and don’t forget the founder of the fair, Burkhard. Burkhard runs one of Germany’s most frequented and renown business blogs, where he introduces his readers to one new business model a day in German, adding up to more than 7.750 in 5.00 days (almost 14 years). Learn more here https://www.best-practice-business.de/ Folge direkt herunterladen

You are listening to the audio track of the regular Frankfurt-to-New-York-Live-Hangout the startup news GermanyWe announce all our live streams on Meetup. Join our meetup group there, it is for free and you won’t miss a stream https://www.meetup.com/Startup-Couch-TV-Talks/ For logistic reasons, this news recording was done upfront. We will bring you the September News live again. Startuprad.io brings you in a Frankfurt-to-New-York-Live-Hangout the startup news Germany. Affiliated Links GlobalUSAEuropeGermanyCo-WorkingWeWorkWeWorkWeWorkWeWorkMarketing / SEO / Graphics / Sounds and moreFiverrFiverrFiverrFiverrEmail service?G-SuiteG-SuiteG-SuiteG-Suite Books we likeIntroduction to Venture Capital Introduction to Venture CapitalIntroduction to Venture CapitalIntroduction to Venture Capital LEAN: Ultimate Collection - Lean Startup, Lean Analytics, Lean Enterprise, Kaizen, Six Sigma, Agile Project Management, Kanban, ScrumLEAN: Ultimate Collection - Lean Startup, Lean Analytics, Lean Enterprise, Kaizen, Six Sigma, Agile Project Management, Kanban, ScrumLEAN: Ultimate Collection - Lean Startup, Lean Analytics, Lean Enterprise, Kaizen, Six Sigma, Agile Project Management, Kanban, ScrumLEAN: Ultimate Collection - Lean Startup, Lean Analytics, Lean Enterprise, Kaizen, Six Sigma, Agile Project Management, Kanban, Scrum How To Launch a Startup: An easy to understand 9-step guide to make your startup idea a real businessHow To Launch a Startup: An easy to understand 9-step guide to make your startup idea a real businessHow To Launch a Startup: An easy to understand 9-step guide to make your startup idea a real businessHow To Launch a Startup: An easy to understand 9-step guide to make your startup idea a real business Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the FutureZero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the FutureZero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the FutureZero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the FutureLearn more about our Affiliated Marketing here: https://www.startuprad.io/blog/affiliate-marketing-at-startuprad-io/ Find the hosts here: Joe Menninger joe@startuprad.io / Twitter / LinkedIn / Video Interview (2018) Chris Fahrenbach chris@startuprad.io / Twitter / Homepage / Video Interview (2018) Find all the show notes here: https://www.startuprad.io/blog/video-startup-news-germany-may-and-june-2019/ Scheduling Message - Summer BreakHi, Joe here. I came back from the moving break and so we do today two months of startup news compressed. We will have our normal summer break after this news podcast, and be back with a summer news-wrap-up end of September. Until then we will publish one interview a week. Sponsoring MessageStartups.observer supports this program. Startups.observer is like online dating for startups and investors. It is by far the easiest and most efficient way to research potential investment candidates or look for potential investors. Learn more here: http://startups.observer/ Find all the show notes here: https://www.startuprad.io/blog/video-startup-news-germany-may-and-june-2019/

We recently hosted a webcast conversation between Lean Startup Co. Faculty Member Elliot Susel, and Aviv Stern, Chief Data Officer at Social Point, a gaming company, to discuss using lean analytics in mobile game development. Don’t have time for the full webcast now? Catch the webcast highlights and tips from their conversation in our companion blog below. Aviv got started working for Fortune 100 companies in a corporate environment in data back when data analytics was called “business intelligence,” he said. No matter what you call it, Aviv said the goal of analytics is finding a way to use data to benefit a business. Aviv praised the Lean Startup method for being intrinsically data driven, a good selling point when you’re trying to convince founders or a small product team to invest in data analytics. “Each of the stages, like build, measure, learn, has integrated into it [a] data-intrinsic approach,” Aviv pointed out. Convincing product development teams to do A/B testing early on—in which you put out two versions of a product or service and see which version is better—can be a challenging battle, Aviv said, so Lean Startup is a great approach to take. Aviv came to Lean Startup after what he called a typical startup experience, “the failing kind” that was also educational. After bootstrapping a data science app for about a year that “we were sure was going to change the world” only to have it fail, it led Aviv to ask how they were developing solutions. “That’s how I found myself really shifting the approach I had…to be much more lean, really focusing very early on validating,” he said. Email us: education@leanstartup.co Follow Lean Startup Co. @leanstartup https://leanstartup.co/education

Our guest today has had a long and varied career in technology. Alistair Croll is a serial entrepreneur, much sought after speaker, prolific author - including the best selling Lean Analytics - which is a must read, an organizer of conferences like Forward50, and consultant to companies large and small. Alistair is a big thinker in the area of Data and Analytics, and we got to cover a lot of ground in this episode.

We're back! This week's Truly Social Podcast Tara & Carlos welcome an old friend Alistair Croll. Alistair is an entrepreneur, author, and event organizer. He's spent a lot of time understanding how organizations of all sizes can use data to make better decisions. He has written three books on technology and entrepreneurship: Lean Analytics (2013); Complete Web Monitoring (2009) and Managing Bandwidth (1999).  Alistair recently wrote 'A better definition of marketing' on his Medium blog on how his definition of marketing in the modern age has changed at a fundamental level. "That companies need to capture attention they can turn into profitable demand. They need to stop writing press releases and start hacking markets. They need to find zero-day growth exploits. And they need to be just evil enough to pull them off." Join us in our discussions about that and more but don't forget to stick to the end to hear Alistair's and our picks for this week’s Truly Social Heroes.  This week's Truly Social Heroes:  Carlos' choice: Steward Reynolds aka Brittlestar Tara's choice: The Secret Life of Canada Podcast Alistair's 2 choices: Canadian entrepreneur, founder of AccessNow and Photographer Maayan Ziv and Dot Everyone's Martha Lane Fox. Make sure to learn about this week's truly social heroes.  Follow Truly Social: on YouTube: https://youtube.com/tarahunt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/trulysocial Visit the website: https://trulysocial.ca Follow us on: Twitter: Tara: https://twitter.com/missrogue Carlos: https://twitter.com/carlospache_co

Ecco cosa scoprirai in questo episodio- Funnel di vendita nei video- Piattaforma per pubblicare video- Come utilizzare un video per avere più contenuti- Come utilizzare i video per il tuo brand- Differenza di video su youtube e facebook- Il funnel per capire che cosa stiamo sbagliando Citazioni dall'episodio:- Spesso non si ha la consapevolezza di avere già un funnel- I video sono un modo per distribuire i contenuti- I video sono perfetti per poi dividerlo in diversi contenuti- Non devi mai fermarti, devi sempre imparare e migliorarti- Non arrendersi, ma provare provare provare, che mi ha permesso di fallire, fallire, fallire, ma di avere successo nel lungo periodo- L’errore più grande è la paura di commettere errori- Al giorno d’oggi non è più chi spende in ads che vince, ma chi ha una relazione con i propri utenti- Non importa cosa leggi, ma leggi- Il lavoro duro paga- Non è importante quanto sei intelligente, è importante quanto lavori più degli altriLink menzionati nell'episodio:- Growth Hacking Day - http://growthhackingday.it - Marketers - https://marketers.academy/gruppo-marketers - Dario Vignali - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dariovignali/ - Marco Montemagno - https://www.facebook.com/realmarcomontemagno - The Rocket Internet https://www.rocket-internet.com/ - Enrico Ferrari https://www.linkedin.com/in/enricof/- Il Metodo Win Hof https://www.wimhofmethod.com/ - Libro consigliato: Lean Analytics https://amzn.to/2K9Atni - Luca Mastella: https://www.facebook.com/luca.mastella.growth https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucamastella/ Contatti:- REGISTRATI AL CANALE TELEGRAM → https://t.me/videomarketingitalia- INVIA UNA DOMANDA → https://t.me/gattimarco - LINKEDIN → https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcogattilink/- WEB → https://www.videomarketingpodcast.it- EMAIL → info@videomarketingpodcast.it

Alistair helps to accelerate startups, and works with some of the world’s biggest companies on business model innovation. As an entrepreneur, he co-founded Coradiant; the Year One Labs accelerator; and a variety of other startups. A sought-after speaker, Alistair has also launched and chaired some of the world’s leading conferences on emerging technology, including Startupfest, Strata, Cloud Connect, FWD50, and Pandemon.io. Alistair is the author of four books on technology and entrepreneurship, including the best-selling Lean Analytics, which has been translated into eight languages and is in its tenth printing in China. A graduate of Dalhousie University, he is a visiting executive at Harvard Business School, where he teaches data science and critical thinking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=QwGVQerp4Bw

This show was a real pleasure for me. I got to interview a person I really look up to, Alistair Croll. I’ve been a huge fan of Alistair’s for years   Alistair helps to accelerate startups, and works with some of the world’s biggest companies on business model innovation. As an entrepreneur, he co-founded Coradiant; the Year One Labs accelerator; and a variety of other startups. A sought-after speaker, Alistair has also launched and chaired some of the world’s leading conferences on emerging technology, including Startupfest, Strata, Cloud Connect, and Pandemon.io. Alistair is the author of four books on technology and entrepreneurship, including the best-selling Lean Analytics, which has been translated into eight languages and is in its tenth printing in China. A graduate of Dalhousie University, he is a visiting executive at Harvard Business School, where he teaches data science and critical thinking.   On the show, we spoke about: His gig at Harvard Business School and “Big Data” His conference Pandemonio, StartupFest and Strata How he considers organizations to be living organisms The weaponization of misinformation His blog, Solve for Interesting How he choose projects   I really enjoyed this episode and humbled to have spoken to someone that’s really moving the needle in terms of innovation and thinking. I hope that you enjoy it as much as I did.   Let us know what you think. What types of guests would like to see on the show? What topics interest you the most? Send me your thoughts at nectar@thepnr.com   Subscribe to iTunes here | Subscribe to Google Play here

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Build measure learn, the One Metric That Matters, and balancing hubris and humility.In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Ben Yoskovitz, investor, entrepreneur, and former VP of product at VarageSale and at GoInstant. We talk about using metrics in product development and why anyone building anything new needs to have both hubris and intellectual honesty. Yoskovitz is co-author of Lean Analytics, and is teaching a two-day course on product strategy as part of the upcoming O'Reilly Design Conference.Here are some highlights from our conversation: Lean Analytics and Lean Startup I think many people will have had this experience where they have an idea, they think it's a great idea. They go out and build something, and they invest heavily in that, from a people perspective, from an hours, from a dollars perspective. They launch it, and nobody cares, or not enough people care, let's say. You realize, wait a second, I've made all these mistakes through that, going through this exercise, going through the motions of building something. Now what do I do? Lean Startup is designed to solve for that, to get you to understand the risks in advance and ‘de-risk’ those things—applying some scientific methodology, or the scientific method, to building products. Lean Analytics is a way of measuring your progress through that process. You need the combination of a little bit of the theory and, well, how do I go about building things? How do I understand what a problem is or how to validate it? How do I do customer interviews? This sort of tactical stuff. Then, Lean Analytics is really about: how do I measure my progress through this so that I know I'm doing it successfully? Not for the sake of just doing Lean Start Up, but so that I can ultimately build something that my users or customers want. Build, measure, learn is at the core of Lean Start Up. When you see it, visually, it's a little cycle. Build, measure, learn—it goes around and around. It's an iterative cycle. We'll say, in Lean Start Up parlance, that you're trying iterate through build, measure, learn as quickly as you possibly can, as frequency as you can to get to the ultimate success. We’re all liars I'll start with ‘we're all liars.’ I say that almost every single time I present. Partly because it's kind of funny, or I'd like to think it is. Partly because it's true. Often, I'm speaking to entrepreneurs, where I think it's particularly true. The reason is, because I think you actually, as an entrepreneur, have to be a bit of a liar. There's a number of reasons for that. One is, you're creating something that doesn't yet exist. You're selling it, whether you're actually selling it or not, but you have to convince others that your vision is real and important. That might be for recruiting people. It might be users. It might be customers. In many ways, you're saying, I believe this thing is true. I'm going to create something to solve this problem or realize this vision. You have to believe me. Let's all agree, that we don't really know if the vision is true. That's where intellectual honesty comes in. Frankly, we say this a lot about the Lean Analytics book, which is, it's not about exclusively using data. It's not about being so wholly data driven that you ignore your gut or insights or anything else. There’s a little bit of lying there. Let's call it a little bit of sizzle before the steak. There's other ways of paraphrasing it. That's one reason. The other, I think, is that entrepreneurs need what I call a reality distortion field. We need to surround ourselves, and I put myself in this bucket as an entrepreneur, because being an entrepreneur is hard. We've all heard that before. It's 100% true. Early-stage employees, I think, would be put into the same bucket, the first handful of employees. You get into an early-stage company and all the risk is there. You have to get up every morning and fight the good fight for what you believe to be true and for the vision that you're working toward achieving. You have to surround yourself in this reality distortion field. Now, having said that, I think where the risk comes is when that reality distortion field gets so strong to the point where you're deluding yourself. That's when, as an entrepreneur, you're running a 100 miles an hour. Another way of thinking about this is ego. Entrepreneurs need ego in order to survive. I believe that to be true. But you can have so much, when you're ego is so big or so strong or so overpowering that you stop listening to other people. You stop recognizing when you're making mistakes. Then, you're going to fail. There's a balance there between ‘we're all liars,’ the reality distortion field, and intellectual honesty, which I believe is so important for entrepreneurs because it's so easy to delude ourselves into believing things that are ultimately not true.

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Build measure learn, the One Metric That Matters, and balancing hubris and humility.In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Ben Yoskovitz, investor, entrepreneur, and former VP of product at VarageSale and at GoInstant. We talk about using metrics in product development and why anyone building anything new needs to have both hubris and intellectual honesty. Yoskovitz is co-author of Lean Analytics, and is teaching a two-day course on product strategy as part of the upcoming O'Reilly Design Conference.Here are some highlights from our conversation: Lean Analytics and Lean Startup I think many people will have had this experience where they have an idea, they think it's a great idea. They go out and build something, and they invest heavily in that, from a people perspective, from an hours, from a dollars perspective. They launch it, and nobody cares, or not enough people care, let's say. You realize, wait a second, I've made all these mistakes through that, going through this exercise, going through the motions of building something. Now what do I do? Lean Startup is designed to solve for that, to get you to understand the risks in advance and ‘de-risk’ those things—applying some scientific methodology, or the scientific method, to building products. Lean Analytics is a way of measuring your progress through that process. You need the combination of a little bit of the theory and, well, how do I go about building things? How do I understand what a problem is or how to validate it? How do I do customer interviews? This sort of tactical stuff. Then, Lean Analytics is really about: how do I measure my progress through this so that I know I'm doing it successfully? Not for the sake of just doing Lean Start Up, but so that I can ultimately build something that my users or customers want. Build, measure, learn is at the core of Lean Start Up. When you see it, visually, it's a little cycle. Build, measure, learn—it goes around and around. It's an iterative cycle. We'll say, in Lean Start Up parlance, that you're trying iterate through build, measure, learn as quickly as you possibly can, as frequency as you can to get to the ultimate success. We’re all liars I'll start with ‘we're all liars.’ I say that almost every single time I present. Partly because it's kind of funny, or I'd like to think it is. Partly because it's true. Often, I'm speaking to entrepreneurs, where I think it's particularly true. The reason is, because I think you actually, as an entrepreneur, have to be a bit of a liar. There's a number of reasons for that. One is, you're creating something that doesn't yet exist. You're selling it, whether you're actually selling it or not, but you have to convince others that your vision is real and important. That might be for recruiting people. It might be users. It might be customers. In many ways, you're saying, I believe this thing is true. I'm going to create something to solve this problem or realize this vision. You have to believe me. Let's all agree, that we don't really know if the vision is true. That's where intellectual honesty comes in. Frankly, we say this a lot about the Lean Analytics book, which is, it's not about exclusively using data. It's not about being so wholly data driven that you ignore your gut or insights or anything else. There’s a little bit of lying there. Let's call it a little bit of sizzle before the steak. There's other ways of paraphrasing it. That's one reason. The other, I think, is that entrepreneurs need what I call a reality distortion field. We need to surround ourselves, and I put myself in this bucket as an entrepreneur, because being an entrepreneur is hard. We've all heard that before. It's 100% true. Early-stage employees, I think, would be put into the same bucket, the first handful of employees. You get into an early-stage company and all the risk is there. You have to get up every morning and fight the good fight for what you believe to be true and for the vision that you're working toward achieving. You have to surround yourself in this reality distortion field. Now, having said that, I think where the risk comes is when that reality distortion field gets so strong to the point where you're deluding yourself. That's when, as an entrepreneur, you're running a 100 miles an hour. Another way of thinking about this is ego. Entrepreneurs need ego in order to survive. I believe that to be true. But you can have so much, when you're ego is so big or so strong or so overpowering that you stop listening to other people. You stop recognizing when you're making mistakes. Then, you're going to fail. There's a balance there between ‘we're all liars,’ the reality distortion field, and intellectual honesty, which I believe is so important for entrepreneurs because it's so easy to delude ourselves into believing things that are ultimately not true.

3:23 Discussing the purpose and aim of Codewars 7:30 The process for building a program with Codewars 11:07 The UI and editor experience 12:55 The challenges faced when first building Codewars 14:23 Explaining PJAX 16:54 Building code on Codewars 21:24 The expanded use of KATA on Codewars 23:11 Practicing “solving problems” and how it translates to real world situations 34:00 How Codewars proves out the persistence of coders 36:41 How Codewars appeals to collaborative workers 44:40 Teachable moments on Codewars 49:40 Always check to see if Codewars is hiring. Codewars uses Qualified.io, which helps automate the hiring process. PICKS: Marrow Sci-fi book Uprooted Fantasy book “Write Less Code” blog post “The Rands Test” blog post Five Stack software development studio “Stranger Things” on Netflix Angular 2 Class in Ft. Lauderdale, Discount Code: JSJ Lean Analytics book Code book Datasmart book Letting Go book

3:23 Discussing the purpose and aim of Codewars 7:30 The process for building a program with Codewars 11:07 The UI and editor experience 12:55 The challenges faced when first building Codewars 14:23 Explaining PJAX 16:54 Building code on Codewars 21:24 The expanded use of KATA on Codewars 23:11 Practicing “solving problems” and how it translates to real world situations 34:00 How Codewars proves out the persistence of coders 36:41 How Codewars appeals to collaborative workers 44:40 Teachable moments on Codewars 49:40 Always check to see if Codewars is hiring. Codewars uses Qualified.io, which helps automate the hiring process. PICKS: Marrow Sci-fi book Uprooted Fantasy book “Write Less Code” blog post “The Rands Test” blog post Five Stack software development studio “Stranger Things” on Netflix Angular 2 Class in Ft. Lauderdale, Discount Code: JSJ Lean Analytics book Code book Datasmart book Letting Go book

3:23 Discussing the purpose and aim of Codewars 7:30 The process for building a program with Codewars 11:07 The UI and editor experience 12:55 The challenges faced when first building Codewars 14:23 Explaining PJAX 16:54 Building code on Codewars 21:24 The expanded use of KATA on Codewars 23:11 Practicing “solving problems” and how it translates to real world situations 34:00 How Codewars proves out the persistence of coders 36:41 How Codewars appeals to collaborative workers 44:40 Teachable moments on Codewars 49:40 Always check to see if Codewars is hiring. Codewars uses Qualified.io, which helps automate the hiring process. PICKS: Marrow Sci-fi book Uprooted Fantasy book “Write Less Code” blog post “The Rands Test” blog post Five Stack software development studio “Stranger Things” on Netflix Angular 2 Class in Ft. Lauderdale, Discount Code: JSJ Lean Analytics book Code book Datasmart book Letting Go book

This podcast is about "On Demand Services" for This Mobile Life (S01E07). My guest was Ilter Dumduz, co-founder of Blys. Blys provides on-demand mobile massage service in Sydney (http://getblys.com.au). I'm very excited to have Ilter as a guest as he's worked in product management at Freelancer, Domain and GlamCorner. It was an awesome interview discussing on-demand services, marketplaces, and product craft. I hope you like it as much as I did chatting with Ilter. If you have any feedback, please leave us a review on iTunes or Soundcloud. If you want to reach out to me, hit me up on twitter @inspiredworlds. SHOW NOTES Prop 1 in Austin affects Uber & Lyft on demand services (http://austininno.streetwise.co/2016/05/06/austins-vote-on-uberlyft-is-today-heres-what-you-need-to-know) Airbnb host protection insurance policy (https://www.airbnb.com.au/host-protection-insurance) Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll & Benjamin Yoskovitz (http://leananalyticsbook.com) 666 Roadmap (http://inspiredworlds.com/restraint-makes-better-apps)

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Ben Yoskovitz on a bottom-up approach to building products and the importance of poking holes in the reality distortion field.This week, we're featuring a special crossover podcast from our O'Reilly Design Podcast. O'Reilly's Mary Treseler chats with investor, entrepreneur, and former VP of product, Ben Yoskovitz. Yoskovitz talks about product design strategy and the benefits of lean approaches, where product teams tend to fall down, and why a bottom-up approach to product design is more successful—and more scalable—than a top-down approach.Here are some highlights from their discussion: Experiment and test I think we all appreciate that it is certainly getting easier to build stuff. At the end of the day, most of the risk for most companies is not can we build it. The risk is, market risk. Will anybody pay for this thing? Does anybody care? Can we build this piece of software or build this feature, usually the answer is yes. Most of us are not building rockets to go to Mars, right? That part is pretty straightforward. Where I think product teams do struggle is with, well, how much should I build? When do I stop building and test? Historically, that hasn't been something that people have done. ...You have to build things like experiments and tests. That's hard for people to wrap their brains around, but also for companies culturally to understand. Bottom-up approach I believe product teams are successful when the ideas are coming from everybody. I think the days of a senior whatever—I don't want to use titles because I don't want to throw anybody under the bus who might have this title. The VP of product or director of product or CEO says, here's what we have to build. I know exactly what to build. Go build it. All I need you to do is, don't think, just execute. That's very hard to do. I don't think in the long run that's a scalable model. What's more successful, and that freedom that you described, is, no, we all have ideas. All of them are valid as long as we don't put a giant bet on any one of them. Let's test 10 ideas and see which handful are actually material. That's more of a bottom-up approach to building product, than a top-down approach. Reality distortion fields Where the risk comes is when that reality distortion field gets so strong to the point where you're deluding yourself. That's when, as an entrepreneur, you're running a 100 miles an hour. You crash and you burn and you die. I actually think that's where intellectual honesty comes in. Frankly, we say this a lot about the Lean Analytics book, which is, it's not about exclusively using data. It's not about being so wholly data-driven that you ignore your gut or insights or anything else. It's just about poking holes in that reality distortion field, so you don't crash, burn, and die. Another way of thinking about this is ego. Entrepreneurs need ego in order to survive. I believe that to be true. You have so much, when you're ego is so big or so strong or so overpowering that you stop listening to other people. You stop recognizing when you're making mistakes. Then, you're going to fail. There's a balance between the 'we're all liars' reality distortion field and intellectual honesty, which I believe is so important for entrepreneurs because it's just so easy to delude ourselves into believing things that are ultimately not true.

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Ben Yoskovitz on a bottom-up approach to building products and the importance of poking holes in the reality distortion field.This week, we're featuring a special crossover podcast from our O'Reilly Design Podcast. O'Reilly's Mary Treseler chats with investor, entrepreneur, and former VP of product, Ben Yoskovitz. Yoskovitz talks about product design strategy and the benefits of lean approaches, where product teams tend to fall down, and why a bottom-up approach to product design is more successful—and more scalable—than a top-down approach.Here are some highlights from their discussion: Experiment and test I think we all appreciate that it is certainly getting easier to build stuff. At the end of the day, most of the risk for most companies is not can we build it. The risk is, market risk. Will anybody pay for this thing? Does anybody care? Can we build this piece of software or build this feature, usually the answer is yes. Most of us are not building rockets to go to Mars, right? That part is pretty straightforward. Where I think product teams do struggle is with, well, how much should I build? When do I stop building and test? Historically, that hasn't been something that people have done. ...You have to build things like experiments and tests. That's hard for people to wrap their brains around, but also for companies culturally to understand. Bottom-up approach I believe product teams are successful when the ideas are coming from everybody. I think the days of a senior whatever—I don't want to use titles because I don't want to throw anybody under the bus who might have this title. The VP of product or director of product or CEO says, here's what we have to build. I know exactly what to build. Go build it. All I need you to do is, don't think, just execute. That's very hard to do. I don't think in the long run that's a scalable model. What's more successful, and that freedom that you described, is, no, we all have ideas. All of them are valid as long as we don't put a giant bet on any one of them. Let's test 10 ideas and see which handful are actually material. That's more of a bottom-up approach to building product, than a top-down approach. Reality distortion fields Where the risk comes is when that reality distortion field gets so strong to the point where you're deluding yourself. That's when, as an entrepreneur, you're running a 100 miles an hour. You crash and you burn and you die. I actually think that's where intellectual honesty comes in. Frankly, we say this a lot about the Lean Analytics book, which is, it's not about exclusively using data. It's not about being so wholly data-driven that you ignore your gut or insights or anything else. It's just about poking holes in that reality distortion field, so you don't crash, burn, and die. Another way of thinking about this is ego. Entrepreneurs need ego in order to survive. I believe that to be true. You have so much, when you're ego is so big or so strong or so overpowering that you stop listening to other people. You stop recognizing when you're making mistakes. Then, you're going to fail. There's a balance between the 'we're all liars' reality distortion field and intellectual honesty, which I believe is so important for entrepreneurs because it's just so easy to delude ourselves into believing things that are ultimately not true.

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Build measure learn, the One Metric That Matters, and balancing hubris and humility.In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Ben Yoskovitz, investor, entrepreneur, and former VP of product at VarageSale and at GoInstant. We talk about using metrics in product development and why anyone building anything new needs to have both hubris and intellectual honesty. Yoskovitz is co-author of Lean Analytics, and is teaching a live online course, Product Strategy for Designers, on June 9, 2016. Here are a few highlights from our conversation: Hubris and humility: A winning combination We're all liars. I say that almost every single time I present. I think as an entrepreneur, you have to be a bit of a liar. There's a number of reasons for that. One is, you're creating something that doesn't yet exist. You're selling it, whether you're actually selling it or not, but you have to convince others that your vision is real and important. That might be for recruiting people. It might be users. It might be customers. In many ways, you're saying, I believe this thing is true. I'm going to create something to solve this problem or realize this vision. You have to believe me. Let's all agree that we don't really know if the vision is true. There has to be a little bit of lying there. Let's call it a little bit of sizzle before the steak. Entrepreneurs need what I call ‘a reality distortion field.’ We need to surround ourselves, and I put myself in this bucket as an entrepreneur, because being an entrepreneur is hard. You have to get up every morning and fight the good fight for what you believe to be true and your vision that you're working toward achieving; you have to surround yourself in this reality distortion field. Now, having said that, I think where the risk comes is when that reality distortion field gets so strong to the point where you're deluding yourself. That's when, as an entrepreneur, you're running 100 miles an hour. You crash and you burn and you die. I actually think, that's where intellectual honesty comes in. Frankly, we say this a lot about the Lean Analytics book, which is: it's not about exclusively using data. It's not about being so wholly data-driven that you ignore your gut or insights or anything else. It's just about poking holes in that reality distortion field, so you don't crash, burn, and die. Entrepreneurs need the ego. You need to have a strong vision for what you're trying to accomplish. You have to be able to get up in front of people and fake it until you make it. Having said that, when that goes too far, then you are doomed to failure. Product management, product design, and product strategy The product manager role, and even how we build products, changes company to company. There's obviously some similarities. For me, this is about helping product designers understand the different approaches to building products, and hopefully relating that to the experiences that they're having at the organizations where they work, whether it's large or small companies. I think it's important for everybody at a company to understand how a business functions and operates, and how it makes decisions, so that I can tie my work, day in and day out, and the value that I'm creating, to the value for the whole company. In the class I’m teaching, we’re going to cover things like business models. On the outside, that can sound pretty easy: my company builds a widget and we sell a widget. There's just so much more to business models than that. A customer or user's experience, the minute they start with us to the end. We’ll address questions including: How does this business function? How does it make money? How do users experience the product or the services? Understanding things like pricing. Understanding the whole ecosystem of what has to happen for a business to function and be successful. Then, try to bring that down to my job as a designer and how that relates to product teams. Nobody in a company works in isolation. A product designer has to work with a product manager, has to work with a developer, has to work with customer support, has to work with sales. How do these things tie together so I have better idea of how a product gets built, so I can provide more input and insight into that and increase the value of the work I'm producing for that company? There's no formula for success, but there's a methodology that you can work your way through in order to, hopefully, find success. We will cover this in the course, too.

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Build measure learn, the One Metric That Matters, and balancing hubris and humility.In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Ben Yoskovitz, investor, entrepreneur, and former VP of product at VarageSale and at GoInstant. We talk about using metrics in product development and why anyone building anything new needs to have both hubris and intellectual honesty. Yoskovitz is co-author of Lean Analytics, and is teaching a live online course, Product Strategy for Designers, on June 9, 2016. Here are a few highlights from our conversation: Hubris and humility: A winning combination We're all liars. I say that almost every single time I present. I think as an entrepreneur, you have to be a bit of a liar. There's a number of reasons for that. One is, you're creating something that doesn't yet exist. You're selling it, whether you're actually selling it or not, but you have to convince others that your vision is real and important. That might be for recruiting people. It might be users. It might be customers. In many ways, you're saying, I believe this thing is true. I'm going to create something to solve this problem or realize this vision. You have to believe me. Let's all agree that we don't really know if the vision is true. There has to be a little bit of lying there. Let's call it a little bit of sizzle before the steak. Entrepreneurs need what I call ‘a reality distortion field.’ We need to surround ourselves, and I put myself in this bucket as an entrepreneur, because being an entrepreneur is hard. You have to get up every morning and fight the good fight for what you believe to be true and your vision that you're working toward achieving; you have to surround yourself in this reality distortion field. Now, having said that, I think where the risk comes is when that reality distortion field gets so strong to the point where you're deluding yourself. That's when, as an entrepreneur, you're running 100 miles an hour. You crash and you burn and you die. I actually think, that's where intellectual honesty comes in. Frankly, we say this a lot about the Lean Analytics book, which is: it's not about exclusively using data. It's not about being so wholly data-driven that you ignore your gut or insights or anything else. It's just about poking holes in that reality distortion field, so you don't crash, burn, and die. Entrepreneurs need the ego. You need to have a strong vision for what you're trying to accomplish. You have to be able to get up in front of people and fake it until you make it. Having said that, when that goes too far, then you are doomed to failure. Product management, product design, and product strategy The product manager role, and even how we build products, changes company to company. There's obviously some similarities. For me, this is about helping product designers understand the different approaches to building products, and hopefully relating that to the experiences that they're having at the organizations where they work, whether it's large or small companies. I think it's important for everybody at a company to understand how a business functions and operates, and how it makes decisions, so that I can tie my work, day in and day out, and the value that I'm creating, to the value for the whole company. In the class I’m teaching, we’re going to cover things like business models. On the outside, that can sound pretty easy: my company builds a widget and we sell a widget. There's just so much more to business models than that. A customer or user's experience, the minute they start with us to the end. We’ll address questions including: How does this business function? How does it make money? How do users experience the product or the services? Understanding things like pricing. Understanding the whole ecosystem of what has to happen for a business to function and be successful. Then, try to bring that down to my job as a designer and how that relates to product teams. Nobody in a company works in isolation. A product designer has to work with a product manager, has to work with a developer, has to work with customer support, has to work with sales. How do these things tie together so I have better idea of how a product gets built, so I can provide more input and insight into that and increase the value of the work I'm producing for that company? There's no formula for success, but there's a methodology that you can work your way through in order to, hopefully, find success. We will cover this in the course, too.

Ben Yoskovitz is the co-author of Lean Analytics, a guide for organisations who want to use data to grow new businesses faster. Ben has been the VP of Product at GoInstant, acquired by Salesforce in 2012, he was the founding partner at Year One Labs, an early stage seed acecelerator based in Montreal. One of the companies that came through the program, Localmind, was acquired by Airbnb. He’s also made 15+ angel investments and runs the Instigator Blog which focuses on lean startup, product management and entrepreneurship. Our discussion covers the following and more: - origins of lean analytics - defining the one metric that matters - what does success look like? - analytics for non-tech companies - analytics for large companies - how much data do you need to make a decision? - knowing when to pivot or persevere - how lean analytics can help product speak finance's language - machine gun testing v targeted testing - using lean analytics in small markets to support the exploration of disruptive innovation   Show Notes: For more on Ben Yoskovitz head to InstigatorBlog.com. You can purchase Lean Analytics (book) here: https://amzn.to/2QTnruH   --- I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’d like to receive a weekly email from me, complete with reflections, books I’ve been reading, words of wisdom and access to blogs, ebooks and more that I’m publishing on a regular basis, just leave your details at www.futuresquared.xyz/subscribe and you’ll receive the very next one. Listen on Apple Podcasts @ goo.gl/sMnEa0 Also available on: Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher and Soundcloud Twitter: www.twitter.com/steveglaveski Instagram: www.instagram.com/@thesteveglaveski Future Squared: www.futuresquared.xyz Steve Glaveski: www.steveglaveski.com Medium: www.medium.com/@steveglaveski  

  On this episode, we discuss the ins and outs of startup metrics. We also caught up with Alistair Croll, author of Lean Analytics, the definitive guide on startup metrics, published by O'Reilly Media. Music: http://www.bensound.com/royalty-free-music For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

This podcast is produced by The Lean Startup Conference, December 9 - 11, 2013 in San Francisco. Visit leanstartup.co for more information. Speakers: Alistair Croll, Ben Yoskovitz A key concept in Lean Startup is the Build-Measure-Learn loop. But what if you don’t know what to measure? All companies face challenges in determining useful metrics, but non-tech companies often have fewer benchmarks than their tech counterparts. In this free webcast, analytics experts Alistair Croll and Ben Yoskovitz will discuss practical approaches to the this problem. Their conversation will be followed by live Q&A with the webcast attendees, so come with your questions in mind. This webcast is produced by The Lean Startup Conference, December 9 - 11 in San Francisco. Visit http://leanstartup.co/ for more information.