forget the product marketing content marketing partner demand gen growth like forget all of it and just think of marketing as you need fuel and you need an engine and goal is like all the things that you're creating i mean this should be obvious but it's the content it's the words the design in some regard just like all the
things you're making all the things that are going to add value an engine is how you get it out to the right people and all of the tracking of that and sort of the ops work i put under engine if you will need an engine and the question is where do you have the biggest challenge right now or where
do you think if you did more you would grow faster is it on fuel side or on the engine side welcome to lenny's podcast i'm lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products i interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experience building and scaling
today's most successful products today my guest is emily kramer emily led and built the marketing teams at asana carda ticketfly and astro which was a startup acquired by slack she was one of the first marketers to be hired at all four companies and has been instrumental in helping these companies build their
marketing function grow their products and build their brands she also writes my favorite newsletter on marketing mkt1 and the best compliment that i can give her is that she's a marketer that thinks like a product manager in our chat emily shares a ton of concrete advice on what to look for in your first marketing hire what the
different archetypes of marketers are and who you should look for based on your business model how to work with marketing effectively as a product team and also what red flags to look for that tell you that your marketing team is not doing a great job emily is super specific and incredibly concrete with her advice including
sharing a ton of templates that you can immediately use that we link to in the show notes i always learn a ton talking to emily and i can't wait for you to hear this episode and so with that i bring you emily kramer i'm excited to chat with my friend john cutler from podcast sponsor amplitude
hey john hey lenny excited to be here john give us a behind the scenes at amplitude when most people think of amplitude they think of product analytics but now you're getting into experimentation and even just launched a cdp what's the thought process there well we've always thought of amplitude as being about supporting the full
product loop think collect data inform bets ship experiments and learn that's the heart of growth to us so the big aha was seen how many customers were using amplitude to analyze experiments use segments for outreach and send data to other destinations experimented cdp came out of listening to and observing our
customers and supporting growth and learning has always been amplitude's core focus right yeah so amplitude tries to meet customers where they are we just launched starter templates and have a great scholarship program for startups there's never been a more important time for growth absolutely agree thanks for joining us john and head to
amplitude.com to get started are you hiring or on the flip side are you looking for a new opportunity well either way check out lenny'sjobs.com talent if you're a hiring manager you can sign up and get access to hundreds of hand created people who are open to new opportunities thousands of people apply to join this
collective and i personally review and accept just about 10 of them you won't find a better place to hire product managers and growth leaders join almost 100 other companies who are actively hiring through this collective and if you're looking around for a new opportunity actively or passively join the collective it's free you can be
anonymous and you can even hide yourself from specific companies you can also leave anytime and you'll only hear from companies that you want to hear from check out lenny'sjobs.com talent emily welcome to this podcast i'm really excited to be chatting with you yeah thanks for having me looking forward to
chatting with you in depth here so if i remember correctly we first met in the first round angel track program maybe two years ago and then since then we've invested in a bunch of different companies together i'm also just a big fan of your newsletter that we're gonna chat about so just a subtle context for folks can
you just give us like a quick high level overview of your illustrious career and then also just plug your newsletter so folks can find it for sure so the theme of my career has been building out marketing teams at b2b startups so early in my careers in advertising went to business school but after that i started doing the startup
thing and i was at ticketfly i was like the second marketer and then i went to asana where i was the first marketer when they were about 30 35 people and built up that team and led the team for just under four years and then i went to a small seed funding company helped them raise her a and eventually went to carta
which was about 300 people when i joined ish give or take but didn't have a marketing function at the time so built that function up from scratch much like asana but at a very different stage in the company's lifecycle and then since then i've been advising and investing full time and now have a small fund
where we invested in early stage b2b and helped them build out marketing so yeah building marketing that's what i do i love it okay so plug your fund in your newsletter real quick just so we cover that oh yeah sorry about that my newsletter is m the letters mkt1.substack.com and my fund is market one capital you
can pretty much find most of these things on mk21.co um links to all the different various things that i'm doing so i can remember um because there's lots of lots of iron in the fire so gotta keep the website up to date so i don't lose track of all the things you have going on there's also a job board and a bunch of other you have
more things going on but i have a number of the same sort of set of set of things awesome and we'll link to that in the show notes and everything i don't think i've told you this but many founders have mentioned you as one of their most helpful angel investors that they've had on their cap table it just comes up
often when we co-invest and the things that you help them most with as far as understand is marketing advice go to market advice hiring marketing people and so i'd love to spend most of our time chatting through basically the advice that you give founders around marketing and the first area i wanted to dig into
is hiring marketing people to non-marketing people it's such a mystery of just like what is a marketing person what do i expect from them how do i hire them how do i find them how do i interview them what should i avoid so my first question is just like what mistakes have you seen founders and teams make when they're thinking about
marketing and hiring marketing people yeah and just to add to that like it's even hard for marketers to hire other marketers like it's even confusing for marketers to know where they fit in and and you know if they haven't been hired yet exactly what world they should be looking at or exactly below they should
be hired on the cheap though while it's very confusing for founders and people who haven't kind of been in a larger marketing team to understand all the different functions like also confusing for for marketers and i think that's just because there's so many different sub functions of marketing and there's so many different things that marketers
could do and there's such a range of being a deep specialist like you have people that are just deep seo specialists or deep paid search specialists or you know or or writers and like they love to write and they write long form content and that's definitely a part of what marketing does but it's a specialty
for sure and then you have people that are just very much generalists and can handle all areas of marketing so a couple of mistakes that i see is just like hiring people that don't cover the area that you need most as a startup and that kind of comes for two reasons one is like you don't know as a founder or someone else doing the
marketing hiring for first person you don't know what you're gonna be doing in marketing like you don't know where your big levers are going to be you don't know what's going to work and so you hire a marketer thinking you know they're like smart they've done this before but really they haven't kind of
things that you need to do before so i see that especially with business model where i think having the right the same business model experience is almost more important than having like industry experience or experience with that audience and i think often people are like i need someone who's you know marketed to hr or marketed to
you know construction or like that specific and my response is you're gonna really narrow your your set of people with that and also it doesn't matter as much because great marketers learn the audience and learn the product quickly and sometimes that fresh set of eyes is helpful and you have other experts in house on the audience but the
business model really dictates what marketing does in a big way and by business model i mean more like are you doing top down sales are you selling to enterprise are you doing bottom up product like growth or have a free version or whatever it is those types of things manner a lot because the set of
marketing activities is just wildly wildly different which i'm sure we'll go into so to kind of summarize here what i tell founders is i usually start when i talk to founders about who you need to hire in marketing because usually the question is i think i need a marketer who do i hire i'm like great question let's try to
nail this down because there isn't one answer it very much depends there's usually some common archetypes but the first thing i say is that like forget all the sub functions that you've heard about in marketing forget the product marketing content marketing partner demand gen growth like forget all of it and just think of marketing as you need
fuel and you need an engine and goal is like all the things that you're creating i mean it should be obvious but it's the content of the word that's the design in some regard all the things you're making all the things that are going to add value an engine is how you get it out to the right people and all of the tracking of
that and sort of the ops work i put under engine it's a little needed in engine and the question is where do you have the biggest challenge right now or where do you think if you did more you would grow faster is it on fuel side or on the engine side typically like if you just think about it logically like you
kind of need you need the fuel first and sometimes what i see is people just build an engine first and they're like why isn't this working we're sending so many outbound emails and it's like well you don't have anything valuable to put in those you have no fuel so this isn't working or you see the flip side where
they're making a whole bunch of things they're writing a bunch of blog posts they're making a bunch of content and they're like this content doesn't work it's like well have you tried distributing it because if you're not distributing that and getting mileage out of it it's a waste of time so this is a big problem in marketing
overall getting the balance of fuel and engine rate but i like to start from like what do you think is going to help most and what does what skill set does your team not have and typically if a team is like sales driven top down they might have you know an sdr or at least an a or two at this time usually
that comes first and top down and so the sdrs are kind of an engine they're an imperfect engine outbound shouldn't be the only thing you're doing and if they're just reaching out and asking people to schedule meetings it might not be that effective but you have a little engine going on so maybe now you need some fuel first on the
other side of it if you're a product like growth or bottom or up like you might have a situation where just nothing's optimized like your website's conversion rates are terrible people are dropping out of the funnel all over the place and you really need someone who can build up these like lifecycle email touches work in product
instead of work with a product growth person as well and you really just like need more engine because people are already finding out about your product or it has some innate virality and you're just not capturing enough of that so i kind of like decode you know what's going to help the most right now and
then ideally you get someone so back to an engine first can actually jump in real quick because that's a really cool framework that i haven't heard before this idea of fuel and engine from a marketing perspective yeah you get a little more concrete what are what are like examples of like you know it doesn't have to be
exhaustive but like when you think about all the things that few could be fuel and all the things all the types of engines what's what are those lists for sure yeah i have a diagram of this stuff in my newsletter awesome we'll link to that yeah so when i think about fuel and engine and what goes on either side it's
important to recognize that some things are fuel and engine some things are fuel or engine and some things are both fuel and engine um let me start with an example of something that's fuel and engine if done well your community like let's just take for instance let's keep it simple because community means
75 things like you have a slack community that should be too land engine you have people creating content in there that maybe you can then use in other areas like you do this well like you take you know what's going on in your community and you do like your community wisdom parts of your gameplay so you're using that as fuel but it's
also an engine because you have people in your audience that you're you can distribute out content to so there's some examples like that but it's a to go back to the question of what's cool and which engine cool is like the copy on your website it's the blog post that you have it's the templates that you've
created it's the video recordings of the webinars or the podcast it's basically content but also like to include some of the copy and i think people have this limited view of contents where they think blog posts and con blackboard's still one part of content like content should be tools resources templates like calculators those kinds of things do
better like positioning i imagine as a positioning yeah like yeah that's some of the product marketing stuff so product marketing is this weird thing and we'll talk about it that's it's kind of in the middle but yeah product marketing doing any positioning again like the web copy which is sort of the first manifestation of your
positioning and messaging or it should be it should be sort of the source of truth for all of that but yeah you're positioning your message doing the words the words and things you're creating that's the fuel things that add value in that way the engine side is what people tend to call like marketing growth or
demand jam or things of that nature that's really the distribution channels the email copy itself is fuel but how you've set up the email and the segmentation you've used and the rules for that drip email like that's the engine you know the seo contents fuel but like your seo sort of like keyword
list or the technical fco and that kind of stuff is sort of engine social media you gotta have good fuel but you also have to like nail it right like exactly what channels you're using and all that stuff so a lot of things have both sides of it so most projects or activities or initiatives have some fuel and some engine i also
consider marketing ops work like the setup of like hubspot or whatever this you might be using like that that's engine it's like you know really like instructing the engine but i kind of put it in that bucket because people who are usually to go to executing on email or executing on ads or things like that you live some working knowledge of
the ops work and the reporting work because you have to to be optimizing i guess admin page is also also engine awesome okay and so kind of coming back to your original piece of advice here is you want to before hiring a marketing person you want to figure out which of these buckets is the biggest constraint to
your growth right exactly you talked about this briefly but is there any like simple heuristics to give you a sense of like it's probably fuel i need more great content maybe some website updates versus like i need to figure out how to get this out is there like how do you think about that high level yeah i mean it's kind of
simple like you can just ask you know what are your top performing pieces of content or what's the top performing page on your website or things of that feature who is your product for why is it better what are the benefits how does it compare to competitors if you don't have an answer for those questions if you don't have top
performing content and you don't know sort of your positioning and all that stuff like you got a fuel problem here oh you wrote this really great piece of content i saw it on your website how are you distributing that what are you doing and they're like oh i shared it on social they didn't really go anywhere
like you got an engine problem or if i say do you know what your final stages are you have two sales people now how does the marketing sales handoff go they're like oh they like share a list in black of everyone they should reach out to them like well we've never mentioned a problem this isn't going to scale so it's just these basic
things like are you doing these things or not and you know sometimes sounders are really great at making the original sort of content and writing the early positioning and they're the best suited to that and they just need someone to help them get that stuff out and that's when they need an engine person so yeah
those so that's like basically how you figure it out and normally when you ask the answers that question they like get it pretty quickly they're like okay i think this is my problem like i can kind of identify it and then it's like okay from here well what exactly do you need and what exact type of marketer do you need and that's
where everyone's answer is always like i think i heard from investors or i've been hearing from other founders that i really need a product marketer and the question is well what do you think a product marketer is and you get a different answer every time in fact when i was at asana our our ceo
any his question that you liked apps all the marketers or all the product marketers that we were interviewing was just what's product marketing and that's the scariest question you can ask a product marketer like it's like no scarier question for a product marketer then hey what's a product marketer they're like oh i have no idea
my job it's me i'm a product marketer but really like a product marketer they understand the product they understand the audience and they understand the market in which you're operating and from there they can figure out how to communicate with your audience about the right things at the right time so they're kind of like laying groundwork
and then they're also doing some work too they're also doing a lot of like the copywriting and the actual messaging and handling sort of launches and sometimes writing writing copy for things like emails and helping set the content strategy and things like that and people think they need product marketers one
because it's like a fake people say but two because product marketers tend to shadow the line between fuel and engine they're more on the fuel side but particularly they've done a lot of launches in the past they have a general understanding of sort of channel strategy and what channels to use at what times and that sort of end and
stuff but product marketers aren't really specialists in writing and producing content they're not specialists in building out marketing opt or doing fbo they're they're definitely more of the generalist function and and so sometimes that's a great answer you need a product marketer but sometimes you
need someone that's scrappier and different in different areas another one of my frameworks is we start with do we need to steal an engine like what are the biggest problems what are the biggest things that if you did you would drive growth and then we talked about sort of the three typical sub functions that you would hire which would be
content community rooms type person a growth demand genotype person and a product marketer and we kind of talk about what those three things mean and kind of align based on what you're saying based on the fuel and engine thing probably this type of person and then from there what i tell people is when you're hiring
your first marketer and probably even your first several marketers you're more want to hire generalists and specialists this is probably true for when you wear an early stage startup but specialists are great to hire it's great to hire contractors that are specialists like the o contractor even the
the contractor who can write like the you know the marketing ops contractor but you want someone who's pretty much a generalist and the way i describe that within mark david usually you hear oh like hire a t-shaped person that bites in one area and has like working knowledge and for at the crop all of them but i use this
thing that i made up which is you want to hire pie shaped marketers and not pie like a dessert but pi like 3.14 where the pie symbol has has two vertical lines so like a t but it has an extra line and it's because you want the first marker to be an expert in one of those three areas that i mentioned product
marketing content marketing growth marketing and you want them to be proficient in another one the second t but you want them to be able to set strategy and know how to hire contractors or all of them and so the promised land of hiring a first marketer they're they're a pie shaped marketer and so then you could hire
a content and product marketing pie chain marketer product marketing growth pie sheet marketer but it's like what are those two spikes and what's the one that you're going to worry less about that they need a working knowledge of the last thing i'll say on the pie piece that really hard to find someone that
content marketer is also really good at growth like that pie shape marketer exists a lot less frequently maybe it's someone who's like really amazing at content distribution or like really amazing at fdo but they don't really exist because the content side is like very it's like one side of the brain and the the growth data stuff is
like a whole other side of the brain and it just you don't find those people very often so yeah you're usually looking for that product marketing growth marketing pie shape person or the product marketing content marketing pie shaped person wow okay this is great so i was going to ask you about well this is dense this is
a lot of marketing window so hopefully we're hopefully we're breaking it down we're getting there so let me try to kind of summarize and see see where we go so i was going to ask you about kind of the archetypes of marketing people and sounds like there's these three is the way you think about it there's
basically a content community person there's a growth person and then there's product marketing which is kind of like in the middle and i guess one question i wanted to ask is there's also just like the growth function product growth growth pms things like that do you see that as the same thing as this growth marketing
person or is that a different type of person in a different role in top-down sales businesses it is 100 different the growth person typically probably called a demand gen person there's a whole other you know rabbit hole we can go down on what's the difference between growth marketing and demand jack and demand is probably more
top of funnel and growth marketing is probably more full funnel at simplest form but it's definitely different there in a product-led growth business the growth marketer and the product grow sort of roll or the hybrid growth role sometimes it can be the same person depending on the guilt that but typically the difference would be that
the growth marketer has more it's doing more of the top of funnel sort of inbound side and the product or the person is doing more like wants to actually get into the product but can be collaborated with that that growth marketer so it can't be the same person an extremely data-driven sort of person that kind of
has a working knowledge of both marketing and product stuff can be one person in those at you know early stage plg companies but i think typically and i'm sure you've seen that like you know at larger companies as growth can get bigger you're going to have some people that come from more of that marketing perspective and you're going
to have to come from more of that product perspective but the question is like is there ever one person that does that okay so to make this a little more concrete even for startups thinking from a startup perspective when you're just thinking about hiring your first say marketing person when you think about this like
set of buckets that you talked about there's content marketing growth marketing product marketing plus to your point there's at larger companies or maybe later stages like separate from a growth pm type person what do you generally think is the right role to hire slash archetype to focus on or is it really
dependent like you said on fuel versus engine versus something else i mean it's highly dependent on again like the business model where you need more of what you already have in place what's going on but the most common archetype that i say you want to hire is is is a product marketer even though i joke that everyone's like sending you a product
marketer but actually understanding what that is first that understands growth marketing as well so they probably work somewhere early on where they've had to have some exposure to that so they understand all the channels they're working with they understand what they can do with those channels and maybe they need to work with contractors on
some of those things and it's just because product marketers usually also that product marketer needs to know how to write like all marketers she had some work to acknowledge and ready but they need to know how to write they need they are the copywriter for a long time like tests that they can write make sure
they can write both short form and long form they're not going to be necessarily as good at writing to say a content person but like they need to be able to write and yeah product marketers just tend to have that ability to write and that ability to understand what channels they can use to reach their audience so they they're
in the middle so often that's the case but i mean sometimes i find that i'm that i'm recommending hiring that growth person first because they maybe already have a couple of really great contractors and they have a couple of really great pieces of content that can just be like gifts that keep on giving
if they keep distributing them and repurposing them what do you look for in this product marketing person you mentioned ability to write is really important what else when someone's like scanning linkedin or just like later talking to them what do you find is important to focus on and look for this can be hard to find but i think i want
to see that they've worked on a team that's early enough where they are not siloed into their specific role because what happens at leader stage companies or at public companies is when you're a product marketer like you don't see what's going on in the rest of marketing at all like you have a very siloed
view of it maybe you're like only working on product launches as a product marketer which is not you know the positioning's already set the audience research already done like they haven't done any of those things or like the channels are all built out like it's just different right i think that's the case in a lot of in a lot of roles at
startups but like you know building it from scratch is different so it doesn't mean that if you're a series a company hiring your first marketer that you need to hire someone that's worked at a series a company but it usually means you're hiring someone that's worked at least at like a growth stage company
where they have exposure to a bunch of areas of marketing also looking for have they seen what great looks like so whether that's they joined us during a burley and it did really well or whether that's they had a stint at a later stage company and then you know early earliest in their career they're a big company
then they went to some fixed power like do they know what high quality sort of great looks like it doesn't always have to be like you don't always have to have been at a startup that everyone thinks of as like oh they're really great at marketing but it is helpful and there are some people that just have a really high quality bar and
really understand what great marketing looks like even if they haven't worked in those companies but i like to say like has worked somewhere early enough that they could set strategy across all of marketing and do they know what grade looked like that's something i'm scanning for i'm also scanning for like for your first
marketer like you don't want to go out i see this mistake all the time like you don't want to go out and hire someone super senior who's like only worked in a public company like that's the wrong person and often vcs are you know sort of lead investors that aren't in a certain niche like they're gonna they're gonna when they
refer candidates to startups like usually the fail i see is they're like here's someone great from google and i'm like i'm sure they're great but they're not great for this role and that's the mistake i see all the time oh we just fired our first marketer they i'm like where did they work they're
like oh they only worked in salesforce i'm like well yeah why is that not a good fit just because they can't they don't understand how all marketing works together and they don't understand how to build a foundation it's much different marketing something that already everybody knows what it is or everybody knows the brand even if they
don't know the product and they have a built-in customer base then building something up for scrap from scratch is just a very different marketing marketing motion and you need to do a lot of things like you need to do a lot of things yourself you need to be a doer so you're really looking for you know
like most roles or most you know lead of function roles at startups like they need to be both strategic and sort of scrappy enough to get the work done like you're gonna be doing it all and then marketing like you're gonna be you're also going to be the first marketer for a little while um and you're going to be doing everything and
so there has to be some sign that you're going to be comfortable with that awesome when do you find that it's usually best to hire your first marketing person i mean stage wise you know you're looking at like sometimes people are really gonna see at sea depending on their business but usually it's in series a or you hire one
sort of more junior person at seat or when you're coming into raising your series a and then you know you have two people right after your series a but really it's like i think it's helpful to have some sort of semblance of product market fit like maybe it's not you're not 100 sure but maybe you have definitely some
successful customers it's not like you know we're working with a design partner to build this out and we have you know we have a couple pilots it's like marketing is really good at accelerating growth and sort of doing things that scale sort of like one to many so if you're still in the very like bespoke like founder led
sales founder led marketing like i'm doing discovery with each of these potential customers and like you know have to modify my product for them like that kind of thing like you don't need one yet like you can do founders can do a fair amount of stuff and they can use some contractors i think you need them earlier in
product growth models because you're not going to hire a sales person then so it's it's more like thinking about go to market holistically and saying like you know do i need one or two people here and what is that and so if you're a top-down model sort of enterprise sale you're probably gonna have a couple sales people before you
hire marketing but that might not be the case and sort of use more self-serve practical growth models you just don't need the sales person so having the marketers helpful so again like the business model affects this a lot but usually like the general rule of thumb is like if you had a marketer what would they do
and like you know i often help people try to figure that out what would they do and would they you know if they stepped on the gas and did all this stuff really well would you be able to handle all those people that can even is it even a good time to bring all those people in to your product so if they like you know are they going to be
held back by where your product is or where some of the discovery on exact business model is or things like that and like that's the case it's just like not a good use of money when they're kind of just like sitting on their hands like i can't spend any money on paid and i like don't have you know there we don't even have
any idea what to say on the website because we're selling four different things like it's just kind of hard to hire someone in that case this episode is brought to you by athletic greens i've been hearing about agwant on basically every podcast that i listen to like tim ferriss and lex friedman and so i finally gave it a shot
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nutritional insurance just to set context most your experiences need to b so i guess you should just let people know this is probably mostly b2b yeah sorry mo yes mostly b2b bytes i think a lot of this holds like i think the fuel engine stuff holds for b2c i think the roles pretty much hold but you might
hear the word brand marketing thrown out a lot more in in b2c and that's more going to be talking about like the fuel stuff and and maybe that's going to be what they hire before they hire say like a product marketer but it's kind of the same set of functions but yeah most my experience is b2b and most of the startups i work with are b2b
but something cool some of it holds yeah i was gonna ask about brand marketing that's like another bucket right we didn't haven't talked about that as a type of skill or does that fall into one of these that you've talked about to me brand marketing is a combination or has some of this some of the work that
happens in by a product marketer and by a content community marketer but maybe they also are more influential on the design side of things and so brand marketing is another one that means like 75 different things sometimes it means like you literally manage the designers or you're like a trader producer and sometimes it means
you're more doing work on like what are the stories that we're trying to tell and you're doing more of the content stuff and sometimes it means i'm doing the positioning work sometimes it needs them like working on sort of like you know the website or like branded paid stuff and like consumer so it means a lot of
things too but usually the person that in b2b the person that kind of owns the brand is is the positioning story side of brand is owned by product marketing and the design side of brand is either just sort of like owned by the product designer on first or like working with a brand designer or if the marketer has skill set there could be
owned by them as well so it's a little murky at first but eventually like in on b2b teams when i've grown teams class you know like 10 15 people i'll have a brand person that is working really closely with the designers and kind of like making sure sure that everything that we're producing on sort of like the content
side of things is up to the the they're acting as sort of an editor there they're making sure everything like ladders up to the overall story so they're helping tell the story they're helping make sure that design is right and like you know in some instances they'll have a brand person that's kind of working on
these larger brand initiatives like we did a huge data study when i was at carta and the person that kind of ran that whole initiative and the events and it was sort of like a separate initiative that had a lot of different parts was my brand marketer they were kind of working on these larger sort of big bat
that's been across all of marketing awesome we talked about the growth pm role kind of adjacent to all this for the typical say plg startup in your experience do you find folks should hire like a more of a marketing person than a growth person that focuses on say conversion or yeah optimism optimizing the funnel or
seo or paid or anything like that what's your what's your experience there for plg i think you want to have a marketer that is responsible for getting into the prop people into the product that's a marketing profile that's using all these channels that's driving inbound that's focused on web conversion uh making sure
your website converts like that's a marketing skill set because it's really likely you have to work with to get this done is really how i think about it and like you have to work with the people that own the website which is marketing for all of these sort of inbound stuff you're now working with other people on
the marketing team so that piece is really a marketing piece the product experiments and the product tests that's the person with a product skill set because they know how to work with other pm they know how to work with engineers and marketers don't and then there's these gray areas like the onboarding experience or like when you
first get into the product and that is like an area where there needs to be like a ton of collaboration so my view is that like if you're going to have a growth pm it's probably helpful for them to have pm experience or product experience but they should be paired as soon as they can be with someone that also
understands or that top of model piece or maybe that person isn't in a full-time growth role but know who on the marketing team is going to work with them on these areas of crossover like you know like onboarding or that first use experience and making sure that like the sign up flow from like filling out something on the website to getting in
the product is really consistent because that area of like i'll call it like a handoff we talk about like the marketing to sales handoff all the time on the go to market side but there's a marketing to product handoff and that's the handoff that's really important in plg and if that feels weird to to a user
like it's two different teams inside of a company but at that often but if that feels weird to a user like you're gonna notice that that all of a sudden feels extremely disjoint or if i'm getting a bunch of product transactional emails while i'm getting a bunch of marketing dripping house so that handoff or that experience needs to be
ironed out or like consistent or there needs to be tons of collaboration there so however that is done i don't really care what the teams look like lots of different companies have different versions of how they do this but the idea is is that experience needs to feel consistent and you need to have collaboration across people that have
those skill sets and you have like a clear process for how that looks and so it's just like getting that marketing sales handoff right in my opinion it's like how do you get the marketing to product handoff right and if it means you have someone that owns onboarding it's in a hybrid role then great if it
means there's like a committee sort of situation with one person at the dri that's great too so i think my answer is i don't think there's one way to structure it it's highly dependent on the company overall and i think you need both skill sets you touched on an area of tension that often comes up between marketing and product
i imagine many listeners hear you saying oh marketing on the website and conversion and and aflo and thinking about the idea of product like growth like the idea there is product will grow our business and oftentimes pms do that work and often times they're really good at it and so i guess the question is in your
experience do you find that it should be marketing more than product or product people is it like depending on the person like maybe they're called the product person but they actually are really good at marketing any insights there and then we're going to talk about just like collaboration between the two functions yeah so i
think the product led growth is a misnomer i think people do anything they can possibly do not call marketing marketing i think we always see this and so i think that product led growth really means not as much sales which means product plus marketing and so that's probably a hot take but product
led growth is just another name for what we like i mean so the product on growth is a little different than like premium or self-serve or these things but it's not you're being handheld by the product you aren't being handheld by the sales team so really to me like it's and you can have a sales assist with product led
grow as well but typically what's more at odds in my mind is like product led growth means you are going to have a huge sales team early on it doesn't mean you're not going to have a huge marketing team early on in fact to me it means you're going to have a bigger marketing team early on because you're not going to have those sales sales is
not communicating with customers so i think it comes back to like what are these teams typically good at and marketing is typically good at the communication piece of one-to-many that's what they're good at and so they are usually good they should be good at figuring out all the channels have a funnel to communicate with people and
product is really using product as a channel by which to communicate with customers prospects et cetera so that's like one way of sort of thinking about the difference on conversion you know conversion also means lots of different things there's like top of funnel conversion getting on the website
and like filling out some other form there's like you know conversion once you're in the product to becoming an active user or inviting people so it's like well which part of conversion web conversion i typically think of something that's owned by marketing because usually product doesn't want to own the website like i really
early on products will sometimes own the website because marketing wasn't there but the website is something that's going to need to be updated like five thousand times and it needs to be on like web slow preferably at this point or dms that's easy to update and if it's like built into the code base that's
like or it's on a headless cms or it's not touchable by marketing that's a huge problem when it comes to once they click the sign up button who should be mostly involved in that process i think again there needs to be i think there's lots of ways to handle that and i think if it's product that kind of has that skill set and the
testing skill set and there's enough volume that you can be doing a bunch of tests like maybe that's the person that owns that but i think there's still going to be a lot of collaboration on the exact words that are used and things like that so i think it's just like whatever it is make it clear where the handoff is
and so maybe it's not like marketing on the entire website because maybe they don't own those flows but like there's this gray area and i think the other big thing is sometimes the forms like the literal forms that are used are built in your website and sometimes they're built in the product and i think that also
drives a lot of it because it's who do you need to help you build these things and if they're built into the product then like the product team needs to own that but i don't think it should be it shouldn't be to me like this like let's not argue about it let's just like we're trying to move this we're trying and here's the things that
marketing is going to do and here's the things that product's going to do and here are the areas of overlap but like i don't think products should be in the business of like owning the whole website and all the type of funnel messaging and all of that stuff like that's just it's not the best use of anyone's time
really i know you had a lot of success with marketing and product working together at asana and kind of double clicking on the same thread what have you seen to be an important part of this collaboration and kind of making the best making one plus one equal three one product of marketing working together at a b2b company yeah
and look like there were definitely ups and downs working marketing working with product of asana as well but i think overall we did a good job because of some of the systems that athana had in place witchings and we've talked about this before but something that asana did well is they had this list in asana of course
everything at asana was in asana through asana by asana but uh we had a list of areas of responsibility which is just who owns what it's not your job title it's what are the things that you are the dri for it doesn't mean you're not going to collaborate with people on those things but what are you the directly responsible individual for and
this made it really easy to know who to go to like the directly responsibility directly i'm just going to use dri because i can't keep saying directly responsible individuals so the dri on tests on the onboarding experience is jennifer the pm but the copywriter for that is i don't know who think of exactly who the person was is devin on
marketing right like so we broke it down that simply so you knew who to go to because often what happens with product is they're like i'm doing a launch i don't know there's especially when there's like 15 markers i don't know lumps has to go to this for this product launch or to like figure out if this is
a launchable feature so i'm just gonna like skip it so it's really helpful to say like the product marketer owner for you know this part of the product is this and to just have this list so just having clear ownership is what this comes down to but it's one thing to have clear ownership but it's like quite
another to for other teams to know like who that clear owner is so i think having a clear list beyond titles and just like who owns what is really helpful and then as you hire new people you can break down those you know the list kind of gets longer because you're going to break things down more you know it goes
from emily owning all of marketing to me like breaking that down and not voting all of it so i found that really helpful i also found at asano we did something called road map week which was before every quarter where we had sort of open meetings so sometimes they were open and sometimes they weren't but we had
cross-functional meetings to help plan for what you were going to do that quarter on your team so like i could sit in on the product road mapping for x as the head of marketing and that was really helpful to just like get a sense for what was going on and sometimes there'd be people in those that were
like silent participators and then like a document would be made so you could see this and this this maybe it doesn't scale forever but it worked really well early on for people being able to be looked at on things to have these sort of out loud planning meetings where you were talking through like here are our
biggest decisions here's what we're like wrestling between and getting input kind of knowing what was going on i think another thing that we did well was also like kind of having clear review processes and all of this sounds like a lot of process but like once you actually make an aor's list it kind of like runs itself like someone new gets
hired they're excited to put in their aors or something get the new responsibility and they're like stoked to like take it over from the head of head of marketing or whatever it is like i finally have handed you like the master managing editor aor it becomes like a you know a big deal the other thing that i think we did well from a
marketing perspective is another newsletter that i have is this framework that i use called the gaps or the ga ccs which gex sounds more fun to say than the ga this is just yeah this is just a marketing brief that that i recommend you do before you make anything and make anything big in marketing or do any big projects and
it's just what are the goals what's the audience what's the creative or unique angle or like what's the like with this thing i guess uh what's gonna make it different and stand out from other companies i guess the second c is the channels or how this is gonna be distributed how are you gonna get the word out about this deep
thinking there and then the last fews are the stakeholders like who's the dri and who needs to weigh in then who's going to be the helper who are the contributors and that's where you can include some product people and you can share this before you start doing any work so for instance if you're doing a
product launch product manager communicates with the marketing team maybe you have a meeting maybe you share some brief from the product side or you share sort of what's being built and then marketing comes back to you with the gas and you can kind of weigh in on oh here are the channels they're going to be using like the you know the
creative c has maybe the highest level messaging and you get buy-in early on and you can like go much faster and then you're not just like sharing with product like here's a blog post that i wrote for the launch they're like what this is the wrong audience the wrong thing like you just save so much time
sharing these types of things up front so i find like there's a handful of different practices that need to be in place but it's like sharing the right information at the right level of information at the right times and having a culture of doing that and it needs to go both ways like product needs
to loop marketing and they're like hey here here's what i'm you know here's what we're working on this quarter here are going to be some of the things that we're launching or any of these interesting that you want to like you know double down on and sort of do a public launch for or whatever it is or hey like we really think onboarding
needs to be approved let's put together like a group that's going to work on this this quarter and like let's not have like a spring plan that's cross-functional it's it's a lot of that so a lot of this happens in a planning process so if you as a company don't have a good planning process like you're not going to have good cross-functional
collaboration especially between product and marketing and i think the last thing is just like a respect for the skill set like recognizing like you're good at this or like you have you have access to engineers you know how to get them to do things like i don't want to do that as a marketer like you know i'm good at
storytelling and i know you know how to get people in the door and in the funnel and like like respect what each person is good at and let them go do their thing so those are just like some of the you know tactical practices and things that we did in asana that i thought worked well but it's hard i mean everyone you know
everyone wants the other team to be doing something a little bit differently and that's always going to be the case and those tensions in some cases are good because that's why you have the benefit of having different teams and different perspectives but it gets out of hand when people are just working in silos and aren't
communicating with each other aren't looping people in on things that they're experts on awesome yeah all the templates and frameworks that you mentioned we're going to link to in the show notes one of the things i love about you is you you almost you're like a pm minded marketer where you make everything super concrete and templated
and yeah and yes and i like a framework i like a framework and i like a template and yeah i am pretty yeah minded like because i i'm pretty well-rounded when it comes to the marketing skill set like i don't really consider myself a growth marketer or a product marketer or a content marketer i just
consider myself a marketer who builds teams and that's like yeah that's a different different mindset and i also love i love goals and planning like not no i don't love like annual planning processes that companies do and like overdone okr exercise it's where you're making like this crazy cascade that
nobody can follow but like basic sort of simple planning so that you you know kind of go a little slower at my fronts and then you can just like fly on getting things out the door like that's that's the kind of teams i like to leave awesome it's like upfront buy-in and then like move that do what you need to do i love the sound of that
we're still we are we're also working on a guest post that may come out before this comes out or after around a lot of these templates so i'm excited to get that out the door coming back to this this kind of tension that often happens between pms and marketing people tell me if you agree but i find that product teams are always
are often very uh skeptical of marketing and find that there's just like all this time energy resources put into marketing efforts and in and it's hard to measure who knows what's happening there while the product continues to evolve you can tell what it's doing it's often driving most of the growth
and so my main question here is as a product person what tells you that the marketing person and team is good and awesome and you should trust them and they know what they're doing versus like okay maybe they're not amazing and we should kind of try to push back any advice yeah i recently did a talk with my friend jenny who was the head of
content at asana and now is the head of content and comms at queerbit and she was sort of joking we were like coming up for the name of the talk and she was like i want to call it content g versus content strategy and i was like well we'll we'll work that in but we don't you know maybe that won't be the title
flattery is a really weird word but it's true a lot of them i but i think it's funny because a lot of what marketing is that flatter g and not strategy meaning it's just like you just throw a bunch of stuff out there and you're doing a bunch of work and it's like a lot of busy work and you want to look busy but it's not
impact focus the best marketing teams are like impact focus they can tell you of all the things they're doing what are the core things that are sort of driving that linear growth or just like keeping the lights on they can tell you what their big bets are like what are the things that we are doing right now that
we believe can cause step to step change top up on all growth or step change growth on sign ups or whatever it might be one of those things what are the big bets that you're taking and then what are the foundational sort of pieces of marketing that aren't done yet like that might be taking up time like we would love to be able to move
faster here but we're like we don't have a good uh lead scoring system or like we're we're working on this like we need to redo our website and here's why we need to like get it into web flow and that will be able to move faster so they should be able to break down like you know here are the core things we
have to do we're measuring we're measuring that like the core work is working by these tpis and it's sort of a full funnel view and we are working on these big bets and like here's the foundational things that are broken so if you ask a marketing lead and you're like what are their big bets and they're like i don't know like
you can't grow at the rate of venture back startup to grow by just like continuing to do incremental things like that's the same product that would imagine as well so like they need to have this sort of framework going on and the other thing that i think is a sign that you're not being impact focused or you're not being effective as a
marketing team is you have this is like my favorite thing to pick on and i see it all the time and i understand why it happened like don't do it it's like our goal is to write 10 blog posts this month and i'm like no that's that's not a goal like that's maybe a tactic but like the goal should be traffic or and the
conversion rate from that traffic or the sign-ups that come from that so it's not you shouldn't have activity goals you should have impact goals and so the best marketing teams are focused on these funnel metrics they're not just focused on a certain number like signups or qualified leads they're focused on that number
plus maintaining or improving the conversion rate that comes after it so they're focused on signups with a conversion rate to activated user uh the same or better than it is now because i can get a lot more people to sign up for a product but like they might be really shitty quality so you need to have sort
of that other threshold so these are some of the things that i look at to say is marketing team impact focused and when i talk to companies or work with marketers and look at you know what are they doing what are their projects like these are the things i usually point out like you need you need to be more impact focused
and here's what you need to do um so that's like sort of the the big thing it's like are they doing a bunch of busy work or are they doing a bunch of things that can actually lead to tangible growth and what metrics are they using to track that the other thing is like if they're not tracking to my point about not just looking at the raw numbers in
each stage of the funnel but looking at the conversion rates if they're not looking at conversion anywhere at all there's a huge problem because again i can throw a bunch of people into a funnel stage if they don't convert to the next one it might not be helping anything so their focus on conversion not just at
the stage of the funnel that they own but throughout the entire funnel i think also is a good indicator on if they're being successful as marketers or not i feel like everything is something yeah these are great i feel like everything you're saying is music to every pm's ears that that great marketing people should
be impact focus have clear goals and kpis you also talked about how it's important to drives like who's responsible for what being really clear about that communicating really clearly and often and then there's this piece about just setting the foundations like a strong foundation that helps make all these
other things successful this is great i imagine every pm would be like this is exactly what i want from my marketing team and your point here is if your marketing team and lead is not doing these things well maybe there's an issue and maybe it's not the right marketing person yeah awesome and look if it's not
the team lead because sometimes you do have especially larger companies you have a team lead that's either like on the you could have someone that's extremely sort of creative and sort of on on the brand side of things but they need to have you know someone that's working with them that is really good at all of this stuff like there's a big
sort of it's almost like we need marketing pm then those tend to be the product marketers or or the lead because there's so many different projects going on and lots of different things happening and it's hard to put it all together and say what are we doing as a marketing team that's moving the needle but i think the other thing
about like communicating often it's also like communicating at the right level i find that marketers even though they're often good at communicating with the audience they're not good at communicating internally and i think i've struggled here too as they move to like leading larger teams and being on executive teams it's just like what
level of information do you need to communicate and you need to educate people about what marketing does because one marketing often has a bad reputation and so you need to be like here's what we're actually doing and moving and two like there's a lot of jargon in marketing and like you gotta separate that out and
like communicate the right level of information at the right time so i think that's hard too and so that's why i like things like the dax framework and and other things like that of like what exactly am i communicating about and at what level it's hard to get right there too amazing one last question before we get to our
very exciting lightning round you've been i can't wait you've been waiting all week um so you mentioned that you be your full-time investor basically at this point and the newsletter is a part of that you've become a really active angel investor and it's really cool to have seen the way you've turned your experience in this
really smart way of getting into great deals and supporting founders and so i'm curious if you have any advice for folks that are thinking about becoming angel investors in the future just like how to leverage their expertise to become successful in investing yeah i think there's a big need for investors that have
functional expertise in traditional traditional vcs they don't necessarily maybe they've founded companies maybe they've always been investors or you know sometimes you've seen dealing empty come from like sales roles or pm pmos but for me and for marketing and maybe for some of the roles that other people
are in like there's not a lot of investors or even advisors from that function and they need help there and so i think more and more founders are seeing instead of having advisors or even hiring you know someone at function early it's like let me lean on angel investors for that and so you know i make it very clear when i
talk to founders this is how i'm going to help like i'm going to help you build your marketing function i'm definitely going to help you hire i'm going to help you shape the job description into the process i'm probably going to refer you some candidates i might even refer the candidate that you hire which has
happened a bunch of times and then i'm going to work with that person to make sure that they're setting the right strategy and doing the right things and so being that clear on like here's my exact value add is incredibly helpful and i mean we get into every deal that we want to we being i have a business partner
named kathleen that i do all this with and we can get into any deal which i think um as like an early angel investor i'm like why are people saying it's hard to get into deals like i don't have this problem and that's not me like tapping myself on the shoulder it's just showing just huge shortage here so your skill
set might be really valuable to founders and even if you feel like oh i don't understand how like everything works at a company or you know things like that like your skill set could be really valuable and they might not see it it's also when you have a unique skill set and a unique way that you help that's well
uh well articulated like we're going to help you build marketing it's like easy to understand it makes it easier for other people to bring you into deals versus here's another generalist investor that's just gonna like help so it's almost like you gotta like product market yourself like what's the product that you're offering and then
it's so easy like you know i need to like bring me into deals where they might need some marketing help and there's tons of investors that do that which gets us the deal full that we need so yeah i just think if you have if you have a niche or you have an area where you're particularly skilled you can
really leverage leverage that into being a sought after angel now if i make sure that investor i'm not sure there's lots of other things you need to get up to speed on to actually be a good investor but from the standpoint of like helping founders and getting into deals that can be that can be really helpful awesome and
the other part is you actually have to deliver because then people share more deals with you and as i said earlier yes i've heard so often how helpful you've been to founders and so that's an important element yeah you definitely have to deliver and again i think that's where it's like really helpful to say where you're going to
deliver so they're not necessarily expecting you to deliver on every little thing like they're expecting me to help them hire their marketer hire contractors in marketing fill in gaps until they have the marketing team that they need and so they know when to come to you and then you respond um yeah i think that's also like when people have
full-time jobs i think it's hard to be able to do that full-time jobs that aren't this it's hard to be able to just like tap in and do this kind of stuff so it's like don't go overboard because your reputation really really matters and that's how we've always seen it like we want to be the most helpful angel
investors or now we have a small front but the helpful sort of most helpful investors that you have in your caption regardless like not just within marketing but within everything and we do that because we can go really deep on an area and we're always responsible in those areas and yeah it's good to hear it's working
because that's what we're trying to do is be really really helpful and the other thing too the last thing i'll say on that is like you know each founder probably thinks maybe they don't that it takes us a lot more time than it actually does to be helpful in that area like i had the same conversations over and over again about
how to hire a marketer like you can do it in my sleep so like me having that conversation with you and like dropping knowledge that you haven't heard like it's it's this is what i do all day but it feels really new because they don't have a lot of people talking to them about marketing we just have a bunch of
candidates that we talk to and our newsletter generate candidates that we talk to so like anyone can go on our website and get on our list of candidates that we refer and i talk to one or two candidates a week from that to just meet more marketers so like i have you know a a list of marketers i can refer and say it's really easy when
founders ask me for referrals so it starts to scale pretty well if you have that niche where you help yeah i was actually gonna add that that um it may sound scary to me feel like you commit to all these startups as an investor you have to help founders all day i can say i've invested over 150
companies at this point which on the surface could feel overwhelming like holy how do you all these founders are probably asking you for advice all the time but i find it's not that then most founders just like leave me alone i'm good or maybe once a quarter here's and here's something i could really use help with but it's
it's not as much time as you think and when it is it's it's really powerful but it's not like a overwhelming amount of time commitment the other thing there too is if you refer someone that a company hires they're gonna love you forever like you remember that because you sit there and you look at that i mean you're maybe not
anymore looking at them in an office but you you know you see are aware of them every day and you remember oh they came from this person so like one of the most valuable things you could do is refer candidates and so you know that's where i think you can add a ton of leverage just referring the right people
so if you have a network and a bunch of people that you know in a certain area like that scenario where you can really do do a lot of good for a startup absolutely speaking of doing good we've reached our exciting lightning round oh great so i'm just gonna ask you five questions real quick whatever comes to mind let me know
first question what are two or three books that you've recommended most to people i kind of like the the classic marketing books maybe because i think that they're not a classic and they're like recency based like marketing changes so fast uh like most things in in startups and technology change is so fast that you know some of the
i i like the things that have stood the test of time and those are things like the tipping point and like crossing the chasm and i like seth godin purple cow which is just like having something that makes you stand out so those are like the classic marketing books i think every marketer or some of them should have read at some
point i think april dunford's obviously awesome is sort of becoming one of those books that every marketer should have read on positioning it's really helpful even if you're not like a product marketer or doing positioning i think it's really helpful and then the book i read most recently is not related to marketing at all i
read uh it's my partner's favorite book and she was always like i don't think you're gonna like this book i don't think you'll like it but it's her favorite book and it's all the light all the light we cannot see or you cannot see about world world world war two which is sort of a depressing topic giving all of
the tumultuousness in the world but i thought it was just a very beautifully written book and when you read a lot of business writing a lot it's kind of nice to step back and just read like really beautiful prose on like a really heavy topic that isn't just like startup marketing so it was kind of fun to go back and read sort of a
older book that was really beautifully written next one lenny next question okay what's your favorite podcast get off books yeah yeah uh besides yours obviously obviously um no i mean you're doing a great job for someone who's just started off doing podcasts like thank you you go deep with people which i think is good it's not
just the service level stuff yeah um look like the podcast i listen to most is like every night when i go to sleep i listen to the daily on the new york times daily like just gets me you know to know what's going on i also like some true crime podcasts but i won't talk about that because maybe that's a little
embarrassing and basic and i think for like just kind of getting understanding founders and startups like over the years i found like how i built this to be really helpful and like i think the main thing i learned from like how i built this is that most startups are really nutty and so like if you feel like if you at the beginning and like if
you feel like oh like this is a mess like we're doing everything wrong like that's kind of common so it's like helpful in that regard too it's like it's not just me but i think there's really interesting you know founder story and hearing how things are built is always helpful so those are some that i like
favorite recent movie or tv show my favorite tv show from this year this year was yellow jackets on showtime which is kind of like lord of the flies which one bunch of women like lord of the flies need lost it's really good so it has like christina richie in it like the person who was in like casper and now and then
if you were like a girl that grew up in the late 80s and 90s you'll know who the christian riches absolutely but yeah uh yellow or an oral guy or a guy any gender yeah i really like yellow jackets i think it's great and it was like the first show in a while that i've been watching it really like for the first couple of episodes like i wasn't on my
phone half the time so that's like my measure for her is it good and then the best movie i've seen recently was we watched um coda which is i think it wants some like oscars or something they get one best picture uh okay so one like the oscar yeah so yeah i'm really original in my picks here and
like oh i just watched the author best picture i thought it was great no but coda was like i think i cried or at least i almost cried oh i cried ever crying movies yeah it's yeah it's about a family who like a non-hearing like a family who can't hear and then their daughter can hear and they become really interested in music and like
there's the story of a family and they're like a family of fishermen in massachusetts which my brother is a clamor in massachusetts that's his job well not his only job but one of his jobs is that he clams so he doesn't quite have that like fisherman vibe but you know somewhat somewhat relevant yeah really really good movie man that
last scene powerful yeah the whole that's it i'm gonna start crying it's a good one it's a good family story okay lenny's crying right now he's just in tears or numbering don't watch remember yeah lenny's gonna spend the rest of the day weeping you want to get a newsletter next week it's just because he's
re-watching coda newsletter yeah speaking of that what's a favorite interview question that you like to ask oh there's so many interview interview questions that that i like to ask i mean like one of the basic interview questions in marketing that i like to ask is just like the company that you're working on
what's the product why is it better who is it for like the most basic positioning question you can ask but a lot of people can't answer it so that's a good one and like also if you're like writing positioning at your company or if you're on marketing your company and you can't tell me what the product is why it's better for it like
go figure that out like that's what the home page of your website should cover in fact the hero of your website and some of you don't a fun question that i like to ask that's more just like it's like a mix of like getting to know you but also seeing how you communicate is like describe something and i didn't come up with this
question but i really like it describe something complicated that you knew you know well that others don't and describe it as simply as you can and it's just interesting to hear what people pick um most people pick things related to cooking which is really strange i asked that question like every interview for a
long time just like kind of as the final question because you learned something about people and yeah so many people play cooking i'm like that's a good choice because i find cooking really complicated and i have no idea how to do it so you know describe describe these various aspects of cooking to me but yeah that's always
a fun one there's other like questions that i always ask like walk me through a project you've done recently from start to finish and i'm listening for things like can you tell me the goal and can you tell the audience but those are those are more boring so i'll stop there awesome what's your favorite interview
oh no this isn't this is i'm asking you questions here i know i'm just i i wanted to flip the lightning round back on you have you ever done your own lighting i haven't but let me i'll answer the question i met away i'm finding the most popular answer to this question is that second one you just gave which is teach me
something i don't know that comes up a lot in these answers yeah teach me something i don't know this is a variation on teach me something i don't know because it's really about how simply can you communicate it like teach me something you don't know comes across as like a little i don't want to say like pretentious but
it's like it's overwhelming well let me teach people i'll add a little flavor to it as they often say give you have a minute to like explain this something i don't know something interesting to you and so it kind of forces you to be simple about it but i like i like streaming yeah i like the comp it's a complicated framing and then
sometimes what i'll do especially if they're going to be someone that's going to be writing because i'll be like okay make it simpler and i'll have them describe it to me again simpler and like i've probably done that in one interview i've probably done it like four times which that part isn't super fun but it's it's
it's it depends on the person if i think they can like handle handle they'll like you know kind of like joking around make it simpler make it simpler and if i think the topic's interesting of course and i'll like want to hear about some things over and over again awesome but yeah i mean it's good to
have interview questions that like maybe teach you something about how maybe teach you something about how they're going to do at the job but also like learn something about the person and in like a way that's not just like tell me about yourself so final question who else in the industry do you most respect as a thought leader
the word thought leader here is getting me down but i'll answer the first part of your smart person as marketers we love we love paid the phrase followers you know some of the other marketers that i think are doing interesting things beyond just marketing is ashley meyer is someone who is a marketer who also has a fund now she was
calms at glossier as well as she used to be a box and things like that is big on twitter she's just someone else who's marketer returned fund manager so it's always nice to have other people like that to kind of compare notes with i think by arielle jackson from first round is an amazing support system to
founders and marketers at startup so if you're not a first round company she's a great resource and i think she's just a great resource in general i also think kevin lee the head of marketing at oyster he's he's an lpnr in our fund he puts out a newsletter and has a full-time job growing a rapidly growing
marketing team so i have a lot of respect he's coming to speak to the people in a course that i'm running next week so he's top of mind but yeah those are some some people that come to mind but i mean i have a lot of marketers that i admire i'm lucky that in our in our fun we have over 50 marketers so i have like a pretty big
arsenal of people i can go to just from from that as well so i lean on the people there for a lot of different things emily this was everything i was hoping it would be i feel like we've and more i feel like we've helped a lot of founders on un understand the the fog of of marketing and i think we're probably going to help a lot of
pms and marketing people work together a lot more effectively hopefully the fog of marketing marketing is the san francisco of functions in the company carl marketing fog carl the marketing fog two two final questions where can folks find you online if they want to reach out learn more and how can
listeners be useful to you yeah i am on twitter and linkedin it's just emily kramer my name pretty simple you can find links to the courses that i run to the newsletter to our job board to talking to me about angel investing as a marketer um on our website mk21.co and that should set you off in the in
the right direction and yeah we have lots of things going on to help marketers build out their teams and help founders build out their marketing team so if that's you and you're in a situation where you're mostly at a b2b company trying to build up marketing get get in touch with me through mine through my website or through twitter
amazing emily thank you for being here thanks for having me this is really fun and i'm looking forward to also having that guest newsletter come out with you and you know just getting lenny lenny eyes it's a weird phrase i won't use that again let's move on move on all right thanks lenny okay thanks thank you so much for listening
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