SPEAKER_00: Today's episode of This Week in Startups is brought to you by HipChat. Bring your team to life with persistent team chat, file sharing, and integrations with the software you use, a team communication tool built for business. HipChat is free forever, and HipChat Plus, including video and screen sharing, is free for the first 1,000 listeners at hipchat.com slash twist. And by LeadGenius, higher quality leads and customized customer data at scale. Schedule a free demo at LeadGenius.com. And by AWS Activate, the Amazon Web Services Startup Program. It's easy to start and scale your business with AWS. Visit aws.amazon.com slash activate.

SPEAKER_01: Hey, everybody. Today, a very special This Week in Startups.

SPEAKER_02: You may have heard we started something called the Launch Incubator. What is the Launch Incubator? Seven companies, 12 weeks, here in my office, learning how to make the next game-changing startup. And who are they going to learn that from? They're going to learn a little bit from me, but I brought in the world's best guest speakers. And today, Jared Fleischer is on the program. He worked doing growth at Slide and at Square, and he's now a venture capitalist. He's a really, really smart dude. And he takes questions from the startups, and you're going to learn how to grow a startup today.

SPEAKER_03: It's an amazing, amazing, very tactical, very technical talk. Enjoy.

SPEAKER_05: That's what it's all about, man. They said money is the root of all evil. What?

SPEAKER_07: Funny how it feeds my people. Yeah. We ain't going to live like people until we get the money, spend the money, and defeat you. Yeah. Money is the root of all evil. What? Funny how it feeds my people.

SPEAKER_10: Yeah. We ain't going to live like people until we get the money, spend the money, and defeat you.

SPEAKER_12: So my name is Jared. A little bit of background on me. My first job in startups was at a company called Slide, which hopefully some of you guys have heard of. We started out early in social media before Facebook had a platform, so back on the days of MySpace and Friendster and Bebo and High Five and Black Planet and this long tail that used to occupy most of our minds for social media. And we really started out thinking down to the basis points of conversion. We were building these flash objects just kind of like a YouTube player for videos, but for photos back when it was really expensive to store and serve photos. And we grew that business. We served about a quarter of a billion impressions a day, 150 million uniques a month. And we had to really change that over time as the Facebook platform went up, and so we followed that. We built apps there on Facebook. And my role really changed from BD to building our first ad products to focusing on monetization and eventually running a product for us here in the States. And then we sold that company at Google in August of 2010. I went to Google and was director of product there. We killed all of our products, started from scratch, had an amazing set of resources and really a blank slate with a team of about 80 here in the US and then a team in Shanghai as well. And we worked on a bunch of products at the intersection of social, mobile, and local. Some of those saw the light of day. Many of them did not. Our core product here was a product called Photovine, which was a reverse photo caption contest where you'd say things like, yellow makes me happy, and I put a picture of my daughter drinking a glass of lemonade, and you might put a picture of somebody in a field of yellow daisies, and you might put a picture of somebody in a yellow dress. And so people came into that conversation, and then we had to kill that product about three weeks later because there were a lot of changes that were happening at Google at that time. In the 12 months I was there, we changed CEOs. We released Google+, lots and lots of things happened, and basically became a very, very different company than we had joined. And so we rolled our team to become part of YouTube, and at that point I was assigned between joining YouTube and going to this awesome company called Square where I'd been an advisor. And so I joined Square as an advisor when there were about 30 people while I was still at Google. Worked with them for about six months on marketing and risk, and then I was at this decision point of do I go to YouTube? It's amazing, you know, second largest internet site on the world, an incredible set of people and just traffic and video content and this huge blank canvas in front of them for how they were going to monetize and all the different revenue streams that they could build out. Or do I go to Square, this also amazing, incredible company that was growing like gangbusters, very, very different space and payments, really for the first time going out and building a self-serve merchant platform for real-world payment processing and then building out some other streams of business there. So I decided to join Square. I couldn't resist the allure. And so I joined as an advisor when we were about 30 people. I joined full-time as general manager when we were about 100. And then I stayed with Square for about 18 months full-time until we were about 700 people. My team was about 70. And at Square I ran growth. Now, that was many things. We had growth on the product side, which was our conversion funnel, our homepage, our homepages of our apps, how we got users in, how we underwrote them, how we added users, and when I say users, I mean merchants to our directory, how we unblock new audiences like non-profits or election campaigns or Girl Scouts, and then on the traditional growth side, our paid marketing, marketing programs, referral programs, corp dev activity, biz dev, partnerships, all this kind of stuff. And so I worked across those groups. And it's interesting because when we talk about growth today and we talk about growth hackers and people that work in growth, we tend to silo those people. We tend to think about things like growth teams and kind of putting people over in this bucket that's really separate from these other groups and that's not how we did it at Square. I'm going to talk about the trade-offs of that so we'll get into the teams, how you hire for those teams. But it's interesting just to note that at Square, we really thought about that role of growth as being across many, many different teams. And then about a year and a half ago, I joined Matrix and we're an early stage venture capital firm. We do mostly Series A investments. Been around 37 years. We have a $450 million fund, four partners out here in Palo Alto and four over in Boston and Cambridge. So the first thing is many teams drive growth, right? So this isn't just one group that's doing it. Even if you have a growth team, that shouldn't be the only team that's working on growth. It's one of the reasons why I have some issues when you start to think about building a growth team off in its own little silo. I think you kind of lose the best parts of how you grow your company. It needs to be built in. You should think about growth as any other part of your organization. Just like marketing or product or engineering, you know, growth is an area, it's a functional area, but it also needs to reach across your org. So there are three pieces that go into how you grow. First, you've got to build an amazing product. Nothing makes up for that. Then, even if you build an amazing product but you're not really good at explaining what that product does, you can't message it, nobody's going to know what the hell you do, right? So it's not going to work. So then you've got to message it really effectively.

SPEAKER_17: And the third is that you need to market it. So I absolutely do not believe in what I call the Noah's Ark mentality, the Noah's Ark strategy of product development. If you build it, they will come. Actually, if you build it, they won't come.

SPEAKER_12: If you build it and you explain it and you market it, then they will come because they'll know what it is and they'll know how to get there.

SPEAKER_17: But there are lots of great products that no one ever knew about, right? That weren't messaged effectively, that were too confusing, that were trying to do too much and they just didn't really get there for product market fit and then they didn't message it, they didn't tell the right people that they were there and they didn't market it, they didn't make it available to people, and so they're standing there but they're on an island and nobody knows they exist. So you've got to nail these three parts and there are some products that have been able to survive who didn't nail all of these parts but this is ideal, this is what you're going for. If you can get each of those three parts, then you grow. So foundationally, before we even get into how you grow your product, the first thing is what I call a core product loop. How many of you guys have heard this term before? Yeah? Okay, cool. So when I talk about core product loop, what I mean is the core loop, the core thing

SPEAKER_12: that almost all of your users go through. Every customer that comes in the system, they go through this set of steps. This is the core.

SPEAKER_17: This is the heart and soul of the product. You have to have this before you can even start thinking about growth because if this is screwed up, then everything you try to do in growth is in vain. It's like having a hole in the bottom of your ship and there's just users that are pouring out and meanwhile, you're pouring them into the top and they're just pouring out the bottom, right? If your loop is broken, you're just doing yourself a disservice and a lot of companies do this. They start out and they go, okay, well, I've got my two founders and then you know what we want? We have our MVP. Let's go ahead and hire a growth person. Well, maybe you're not ready for a growth person, right? Maybe you haven't figured this out. Maybe you still have a lot of leaks in the bottom of your boat. You'd be better off patching those leaks versus having somebody come in and put fuel in, right? So I'm going to walk you through what our core product loop was at Square just to make this a little bit more tangible and then we'll talk a little bit

SPEAKER_12: about what your role might be if you were running growth or what the role would be of a growth person that you hire.

SPEAKER_23: Hey, everybody. I want to tell you about a product that I use all day long. It's called HipChat. Now, what is HipChat?

SPEAKER_25: It's persistent chat rooms for business. It's an enterprise piece of software that I use to keep in touch with literally 25 different team members across no less than two dozen projects, no less than two companies and I use it at my public events like Launch, Festival, Scale, This Week in Startups, et cetera. Now, why are chat rooms important? Let me explain it to you. A lot of times you want to have a quick conversation with somebody. Many companies now are distributed multiple locations, work from home, et cetera. Also, we're all on the go constantly, right? Meetings, weekends, nighttime, et cetera. What happens when you have persistent chat rooms is you can create a chat room for a project that you're working on. So, as an example for Inside.com, the startup I'm building, I have a chat room for the Web 2.0 site, I have one for Android, I have one for iOS, I have one for the 3.0 designs, I have one for Launch Festival, one for This Week in Startups. You get the idea. All the different projects I'm working on. And so, when I want to talk to somebody and just ask them a question, instead of firing up Gmail, sending an email, CCing a bunch of people, and then all my employees take their whole day and spend it in email, and when you say, hey, what did you work on today? They're like, I got through my email. You're like, really? I'm paying you all this money to get through your email. Nonsense. We're here to do work. We're here to build products and services that people love, et cetera. And so, what's great about a chat room is, you pop into it and you say, at Jason, do you like these projectors for the stage at Launch Festival? At Jason, what do you think about having these three guests on This Week in Startups? And then I go back and I say, at Jackie, Emmy Woodwarding producer, hey, yes to these two, hell no to this one, this person's a bore. Anyway, that would all have been an email thread with multiple people on it and we would be in this email reply-all thread hell. It's a disaster. It's better to have these contained chat rooms that you have the entire history of and that you can search, which is super powerful because I will say to somebody, hey, here's something I want to do, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they say, oh, I remember Jason talked about that last week and he said, yeah, you talked about having Kim Kardashian talk about her mobile app at the show? I said, yeah. He said, okay, just type in Kardashian and see when she was mentioned. It's like, three times. We talked about this six months ago actually and we actually talked to her manager, whatever it is. Anyway, it's better than I am. It's better than email. It's better than meetings. It's better than anything and it's free. So that's right. You can go use it for free forever and people like Netflix, Dropbox, Salesforce and myself use it. It integrates with Jira, GitHub, Bitbucket and 50 more. We do things like send RSS feeds into it. I could talk about all the features and how much time it saves me but all you need to know is it's free for the regular service. Yes, you can use it for free. Go to hipchat.com. However, if you want Hipchat Plus which has video and screen sharing, you can get it free for the first six months. That's right, for our first thousand listeners. Go to hipchat.com slash twist. Hipchat.com slash twist to get six months free and please do me a favor. Just say thank you at Hipchat for sponsoring independent media like at TWI Startups on your Twitter handle and I want to just say thank you to Hipchat. I've spent, I don't know, two, three years in the product. I love it. It has made me so much more efficient. When I'm out, I'm typing things on my phone. When I get back to my desktop, I'm doing it on my laptop. It is a fantastic, fantastic product. I give it a plus.

SPEAKER_23: You have to go use it. Go to hipchat.com slash twist.

SPEAKER_17: So here our core product loop is the transaction. So a customer comes up, they hand their card over to a merchant, they slide their card. Then the merchant goes to the customer and says, please sign with your finger. The customer engages with that merchant and then ultimately a receipt gets printed or sent to the customer via email which is what happens in most cases with Square via text message and then at the end there's this decision point for the customer, right? So they could do nothing and that's what most people do, right? They just paid for their item. That's what they were trying to do. They could receive that receipt and go, huh, that's pretty cool. Well, you know, I run a small business or I sell things at a flea market or I do arts and crafts or I have a store here or I help my daughter with Girl Scout cookies. Like I may have a need for something to sell and so maybe I sign up for Square, right? That would be another option. They could say, I don't have that need but I know Sarah down the street at that coffee shop that says cash only and I go on all the time and I go, this happens all the time. So this is our core loop. So when you think about this core loop, what do you think you're trying to do? When you think about the core loop for your product, what's the first thing that you guys think about as you go through your core loop?

SPEAKER_12: How do you make that better? How do you think about optimizing this? How do you think about improving this?

SPEAKER_31: Smallest number of steps.

SPEAKER_12: Smallest number of steps. Yeah, that's a great one. Do you have a different one?

SPEAKER_33: You want it to be obviously a conversion and you want it to multiply.

SPEAKER_12: Yeah, exactly. So I put these three things that are kind of cut off over here but simplify, optimize,

SPEAKER_17: and differentiate. These are the three principles that I think about. So first is, you want this to be as simple as possible. Why? Well, friction is the enemy, right? You want people to go through this. You want them to understand it. You want them to go through it rapidly to be excited about it, right? Then you want to figure out how can you optimize it? So at each stage, is there an opportunity to do something for your customers? That's better for your product? That's better for the network that you're trying to build? And then lastly, you want to differentiate. Now this one's pretty important. I'm amazed by how many people I talk to that don't think about what I call the status quo. So if your product didn't exist in the world, what would your customers do instead, right? If your product didn't exist in the world, what would your customers do instead? You guys know this, right? The first generation of your product was an email list.

SPEAKER_12: So what do they do instead? They cry and cry. Yeah.

SPEAKER_38: Maybe Google. Google. Yeah.

SPEAKER_17: So the first thing I would do if I were building a product is I would graph out the shitty, am I allowed to say shitty? I can say anything. It's your show. Why not? I'm sure you've said words. So you graph out the crappy user experience that the customer has today. What is the core loop that exists as the status quo? Right? And that core loop could be your next best competitor or if you're in a greenfield space that core loop could just be the cobbled together things that customers have to do to satisfy, to get to the end goal of what your product enables them to do. Right? So what did customers do before? I love talking about it with Square, right? Because it's so painful. So first, my least favorite thing about payments? Any guess?

SPEAKER_49: That you have to make money?

SPEAKER_17: That I have to make them. That I part with my money. That's my money. Exactly. So you started with a horrible premise with payments, right? First, I'm going to take money that I earned and I'm going to give it to someone else. That's not what I want to do. So first, I start out and I give money. You're already starting in a pretty tough space. So if I walk over to Blue Bottle before they started using Square, I would wait in line for about three hours. And then after I got to the counter, they'd ask me what I want. And then they would ask me for money and I would hand them my money. If I paid with credit card, they would look at my total, type it into this dumb terminal, this gray box that doesn't talk to the cash register, type in the amount, type in the last four digits of my card to confirm it. Then that would print a receipt. The register would print a receipt. I would sign my copy of the receipt from the terminal and give that to them. And then, because everybody wants a keepsake, they would take the copy of the register receipt and the copy of the extra receipt from the terminal, staple it together, and then right as you have this beautiful, amazing thought thought through every detail, experience, you have your coffee and your nice fresh baked cookie and then your two pieces of paper stapled together for $5.97. Is there a trash can right by the register because you don't want that receipt? Well, no, that would ruin the ambiance. So now I have these two pieces of paper and they're stapled and I have nowhere to put that and my hands are full, right? It's just this horrible experience. I certainly don't feel anything positive about the payment experience, right? At best, it's a forgotten experience. It's something I don't think about at all. And before Square came along, if you talk to the average customer and you said, hey, you know, you talk to a hundred customers that go through a payment fund, you go, who's that company that's processing payments for them? I have no idea, right? It was never a branded opportunity. It was never something that people paid attention to, right? There was no opportunity for that. And so Square came in and we said, hey, we want customers to know who we are. We're willing to put our brand on the line to create an experience that they're going to love. So first, we started out with a transaction and we made the Square reader white. We used to have black and white readers. Now we only have white. Any guess of why? Stands out. We want to be seen. We want our brand to represent something singular, something clear, right? We thought about designing cases that would hold the reader in place and that would keep it fixed. Decided, no, we should just keep innovating on the reader and make the reader swipe and be really amazing without covering it up, without taking it away from the customer. Because when we thought about it, we wanted people to know what are they using. And then, what happened here? First time ever, we said, hey, I want to talk to you. You're the customer. Here, sign this, right? Touch my product. Engage with it. That was really different, right? Customers had never done that before. And then, we sent them this receipt. And the receipt, if you look at Square's receipts over time, they've become richer and richer and richer. There's more and more content about that, down to the number of items that they purchase, a map of where it was, their signature, all of these things, right? So that they have all that information about the merchant. So we thought about the status quo and then we looked at each of these steps and we said, can make it more interesting, more fun, more exciting, right? Now, let me ask you a question just about Square. So why do we support coffee shops?

SPEAKER_57: Because they're mostly cash only.

SPEAKER_17: They're mostly cash only. There's a really pronounced need. But we lose money on a lot of coffee shop transactions, right? You can't make money on a Dollaramax transaction. So why the hell do we support that?

SPEAKER_58: It's a wide range of people.

SPEAKER_17: You got it. You got it. So sometimes you have to think about this in not a dollars and cents way. It turns out that dentists and doctors and accountants and lawyers, they all drink coffee. And as they walk in, some percentage of them see that shiny white dongle or now the square stand and they go, huh, I have a need for that. That could help, right? So when you think about growth, this is why you can't decouple it. This is why you can't put it over in the corner and say, come on, growth hacker wizard person, make me grow. Our hardware helped us grow. Our product team helped us grow. Our marketing helped us grow, right? All of these things helped us to grow. And so you really have to think about it end to end. So look for those opportunities in your core product loop. Think about the status quo. How can you differentiate? How can you add a little bit of magic, a little bit of light, something unexpected, right? It'll all help you grow. And keep this principle in mind. Growth is not fire. It's fuel. If your core product loop isn't working, think about your core product as the fire, right? You take growth, you pour users on top of it, the flames go up, it's amazing, right? It's fuel. If you don't have core product, you have wet logs, right? It doesn't help you. You're just putting users in and they're coming out the other side. So let's talk about this guy. This is the growth hacker. You've all been waiting for him. Him or her, actually. You can go hire this person. They know how to grow everything up into the right. Doesn't matter what your product is, what the area is, how it's going to grow. They're magical. They're amazing. So amazing that they don't actually exist. So when you think about hiring for growth, how do you do this, right? If you can't hire this jack-of-all-trades person who's going to come in and be able to grow every area of your business, what do you do? Well, I'd encourage you to find people that are cross-functional. There are three different attributes that I think of when I think about hiring for growth. The first one is someone who's quantitative. At the end of the day, growth is about numbers, right? It's about tracking a number of different elements. It's not just the quantity, but the quality of those users. You have to track them through. That's probably the biggest mistake people make is they find people and they focus on just that first step. How many users did I get in? How many downloads did I get? How many activations, right? And that's okay if that first event is your end goal, right? In e-commerce, how many purchases got made? How much money? It's a pretty good event. And if you're ROI positive on that, yeah, I mean, you could look at subsequent events and lifetime value and all that, but if you can make it on that one event, maybe that's good enough for you to look at. For most of us, it's not good enough to look at that first event. We have to look at a lifetime of a customer. That means we have to understand a lifetime of a customer. It means that when we create LTVs, we may need 10 different LTVs for our products because we may have 10 different user types. So you need somebody quantitative who understands that, who can look at those numbers, who can track them, who can set goals, who can hit those goals. But you don't want somebody who's just quantitative. You need somebody who's also going to be creative. Now, why? A quantitative person is going to hit their own ceiling, right? They're not going to be able to break out of those bounds. And I'll give you an example for this. We've found with freemium that in most products, we're willing to introduce these really low price points, allow customers to come in the door, and try before they buy. In consumer products, in enterprise products, and in products where you don't pay, we still try to get users in really low. Like we might have wanted them to fill out a whole profile or to do this or do that. And we used to do that, right? 10 years ago, we used to just say, hey, we need all this information from you. We need you to make this payment. Hey, in enterprise, this is what it costs. Huge fixed upfront costs. And now we've started to take a risk. We've started to say, hey, maybe we understand who our users are, and we can bet on them over the life of them being with us as a customer. But the quantitative person who thinks about that may never come to realize that you have to change that entire flow because they're so busy optimizing for each step of that process. So you need somebody who's creative enough to go, maybe I should get rid of the subscription. Maybe I should rethink it entirely. Maybe I should get rid of the payment. Maybe I should ask for different information. Maybe I'm approaching this all wrong. And there's lots and lots of cases of this. So you want somebody who's creative enough to not just think about the numbers, but the numbers plus. The numbers plus what other people are doing, what they could do, what things haven't been done before, what they can learn from different industries, all different elements. And the last one is you want them to be collaborative. Growth comes from all those different teams. You've got to build a great product. You have to market it effectively and clearly. And you have to be able to message it so that people understand what you do. Well, that requires working with all sorts of different people in your organization. So the best growth people that I've met tend to have a background in product management because they do all of these things as a PM. When you're a PM, you generally don't manage anyone. You might manage one or two junior level PMs or analysts. Outside of that, you don't really manage many people. And yet, you're expected to get this whole team of people to do what you want them to do. You set a roadmap, so you're defining explicit goals. You're tracking the success of those features, so you're quantitative and you're holding yourself accountable. You're creative to come up with new solutions to product. What are the new features? What are the things your customers are wanting? You're integrating their feedback. And then you're collaborating, right? You're working with engineering and design and community and customer support and the product team. So you have a lot of those skills. And that's generally what growth people should do. They should be able to have more influence out of respect versus out of a position power. So like knowledge versus position power. So I always look for people that have backgrounds in product management because they're used to having no position power and somehow getting a bunch of people in various different fields and areas and functional skill sets to do the thing they want to do towards some bigger, greater goal, right? And it's a very similar task.

SPEAKER_23: Okay. Let's talk about sales. Let's talk about sales at your company. Sales is a multi-stage process.

SPEAKER_25: There's a funnel. You find a lead. You qualify the lead. You put them into the CRM. You reach out to them. You say, are you interested? Do you like my product? Are you ready to commit to it? Then you try to get them materials. Then you try to get a contract signed. And then you go into customer happiness, right? There's this whole flow. We all know about it. We're all doing it. One of the hardest parts is getting leads. And that's where Lead Genius comes in. LeadGenius.com. Go check out LeadGenius.com. And you can go to LeadGenius.com slash twist. LeadGenius is a company I invested in because I'm using the product. I love the product. And I think it solves a huge problem, which is sales departments have expensive people who don't like to do the lead generation part of the business. It is, it just takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of diligence. You need to have the right mindset for it to go out there and qualify a hundred leads, then to reach out to them, then to put them in the CRM, and to send them an email, all that stuff. Your high-priced salespeople should not be doing that. Your partnership people should not be doing that. You should use LeadGenius for that. You outsource it. They integrate with your CRM, whether it's Tout or some other system, Salesforce, whatever. And they start getting that contact information into your database so your sales folks aren't wasting time doing that. They get the initial emails going. And they do this all with full knowledge of who you are and what your products are and who your sales executives are. In other words, you're outsourcing that first 25% of the sales process and it will make you so much more efficient and it will be so much more efficient on a dollar basis than having high-priced salespeople doing something that they're not optimized for and, frankly, they don't like doing. They'd rather be at lunches. They'd rather be doing proposals. They'd rather be getting deals signed than finding the leads. LeadGenius finds the good leads. And here is a special, special offer. Go to leadgenius.com slash twist and you will get a free audit and critique of your sales process. And this is critical because your sales process could be improved and all LeadGenius does all day long, this is why I invested in it, is they help startups and larger companies figure out how to increase sales by getting better leads. That is the reason they exist. That's all they focus on and they're so focused on it that they do it better than you or I could ever do it. Do you understand what I'm saying to you? For the love of God, stop wasting time trying to find the leads and get the great leads that LeadGenius will go curate for you. And they scrutinize this stuff. They're really good at it. And Stripe and Signified and Launch uses it. It is amazing. And you're not going to waste time with bad leads. I mean, that's another thing. It's just the time saving of wasting all this time talking to people who are never going to buy your product. They're experts at qualifying these leads. Everybody say thank you at LeadGenius on Twitter and go to leadgenius.com slash twist. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. So now let's talk about Seam.

SPEAKER_17: It's probably the thing I like to talk about most is how you structure this team. So you can either have a centralized team and this would be a growth team or you can have decentralized where you might have someone who has growth sensibility and growth DNA kind of in their blood. They have growth thinking on their mind, but they're embedded. You have a growth person in your product team, a growth person in your marketing team, a growth person in your design team. Now there are trade-offs to each of these, right? So how many people think that they would prefer in their company to build a centralized growth team? Raise your hand.

SPEAKER_12: None of you? You have to pick one of these, by the way. How many? A decentralized team. Wow, everybody.

SPEAKER_81: Interesting.

SPEAKER_17: Okay. There's actually not a right answer for this and most companies have either done one or the other or they end up in, shockingly, a hybrid compromise of somewhere in the middle. So when I started at Square, we built a growth team over here on the centralized side. So we were one team. We started out where we had engineers and designers and we were kind of this monolithic team that would go in and we could modify pretty much any area of the product to help us grow. Over time, we shifted and we said, let's blow up that team and integrate them into each of our other groups. And what you tend to see is that over time, companies wind up somewhere in the middle and I'll explain what that means. So on the centralized side, why do people do this? Well, you have a group of people that come together and this is actually not specific to growth. So I'm going to use business intelligence as an example because I think it's a really good parallel and it's something that people have more experience with because it's just existed longer. Growth teams are still relatively new in the last maybe three or four years you start to hear them pop up at teams, sorry, at companies. So in a business intelligence or analysis team, sometimes you see this centralized, sometimes you see it decentralized. You'll see analysts that are in individual teams or you'll see one big group. So in a centralized version, why is that good? Well, you tend to get higher quality work product because you have all of these people who do the same skill set all together, right? They do the same thing, they all have a similar background. Some are more senior than others. There's a clear career track so people are really excited about joining that team. There's like one brain of those people working together. They have shared tool sets. When they get data, they put into a central repository and they can turn to the person next to them and say, hey, Jill, where did you put that information? Hey, have you done a report on this? They come together as a team. They share their learnings. They push each other to be better and you can do huge projects, right? Because you can flex and scale. If you're running that team and you get a project that requires four people, you have four people to do it. Whereas if an individual product has a four-person job and they only have one person who works on business intelligence, they just have one person that works on it, right? They don't have a really easy way to flex and scale. So those are all the pros. Now for the cons. Some of the same stuff. They're a centralized team. They're away from your product. They're away from your other teams. They're not in the day-to-day meetings. They're not in the nitty-gritty. They often are seen as a consulting organization. They're this thing on the side that I go to for rubber stamp approval or with projects. And I get their involvement in this kind of sequestered, clearly defined box when I ask them to. And it means that they only help me when I ask them and I am my own ceiling, right? I create my own barriers because I only go to them when I think I need help versus them coming in and being a more holistic part of my product development experience, right? And they're just not as nimble. They're not as iterated. They don't feel like they're part of the team. So for me, I prefer a decentralized model and some bit of a hybrid where you still have the idea of I am part of some greater growth organization or part of some greater business intelligence organization. So I either like where you have an individual team but they're dog-eared people. So, hey, Sarah, you work with this product and that might shift every month, every few weeks. But for the most part, Sarah is dedicated to that product and that team. And she's in it and she might sit with them and she's thought of as part of their team. Or where you do the reverse where you say, she really is in that team and she's reporting to that product organization. She's part of it. She's in the weed. She's at all their stand-ups and Daily All-Hands and all of this. And yet, every once in a while she gets together with the community of us as growth people and shares what she's been working on. And we have an alias and we have a weekly meet-up or a bi-weekly meet-up and we share our information and we have a shared drive or a place that we put our findings and our information. So I think you want to create community among these people and give them a career track and bring them together with like-minded individuals. But I think that the trade-off is probably on that side and not on the, hey, are they connected to, do they understand the product? Otherwise, they have a surface-level interaction with each of your products and they just never get into the weeds at the level that they should. Just my personal opinion, there's not a right or wrong way. Lots of companies do both. Most companies end up somewhere in the middle with that kind of hybrid approach. So what's the work? The work that you do as a growth person, simply stated, is to capture value and build community. So value comes from users in four different ways. First, they can pay you money. They can create content for you. They can give you their eyeballs. Or they can give you other users. That's it. These are the four buckets, right? It doesn't matter what business you are, but every company I've ever worked on, every product, everything boils down to this. There's only four ways, right? It can be direct value or deferred value. So content is generally deferred value. YouTube gets a lot of value from customers by them creating content. They upload videos. That content is then seen by another user, and some of that content is paid for by users, right? It's their whole business. You can literally run any company through this model. Name any company that you want. Let's do it with a random company.

SPEAKER_12: Chevron. Chevron. Wow, okay. Yeah, there you go. Perfect. So Chevron's users

SPEAKER_17: go to their website? No, so Chevron's users drive up, and they pay money, and they get a product.

SPEAKER_12: It's really, really basic. Pretty simple.

SPEAKER_17: If Chevron did a loyalty program or did something else, maybe they would get users to bring other users into the system, or if they did some partnership where for some reason

SPEAKER_12: you had an engine that only ran on Chevron, who knows? But for the most part, people just come in and they pay for the product.

SPEAKER_17: Now, when you think about this, community is a really big element, right? So in these deferred business models where you're not collecting money directly or immediately, you're trying to get these other users to come back in, and at some point, you want to convert this to money. So the two things that convert to money tend to be content or eyeballs, right? You're either paying to get some product, some service, some content. That content could be created by me. It could be created by other users in the system. Or I'm just giving you viewership and someone else is paying for your viewership and attention. Yeah?

SPEAKER_103: Run us through it for Thumbtack.

SPEAKER_17: Sure. So Thumbtack has two different people that come into their system, right? So they have, on the supply side, the service providers that come in, and those service providers effectively give them content. They say, look, I'm a plumber. I can give you access to my plumbing services, right? So this is content. And the only reason why people go to Thumbtack, right, as a user, is because they go, well, I want plumbers. If there was no supply, no liquidity in the market, they wouldn't go to Thumbtack, right? So then you have users that come in and they say, I want that content, I want that service, and I'm willing to pay for it. And the reason why the supply side goes there is they know they're going to get paid eventually for this service that they're putting up there and they're promoting. And the reason why users go there, consumers, is that they say, I want that service and I'm willing to pay for it, right? So it works on their side as well. So I literally think you can run any business through this model. Community is an interesting element of this. When we think about viral growth, when we think about getting other users in the system, we're ultimately trying to get them in to get us one of these other top three things, right? And this means that we can have users that give us value in different ways. We can have users that never pay us a dime and they are incredibly valuable, right? We can have users that pay us tons of money and they're valuable in their own way. We can have users that are just prolific, amazing people that go out and get us other customers and they're also really valuable, right? So it just depends on your business and figuring out what you want to do. But generally, you shouldn't have a myopic viewpoint at how you look at users and the value they create. You just have to think about these as user types that you have who are adding value back into that system. Cool. So then we get to marketing, right? The first thing, paid marketing. It's not a bad thing. It doesn't mean that you've failed. It doesn't mean that you're desperate. I'm amazed at how many new entrepreneurs come in and they stand up and they give their pitch and they say, and 100% of our growth is organic. It's amazing. First thing that goes through my mind, I wonder what your growth would look like if you had paid some money for it. Right? That looks amazing. What if you had invested in some paid channels? You guys are making money hand over fist. What are you doing with that money? Why aren't you reinvesting it in your product, in your users? What are you saving it for a rainy day? Like, what are you doing? Pun intended, I guess. So, I think it's a really important thing to understand. I'm not saying you should go out and just start spending money like gangbusters. But if you're getting money into the system, right, then you should be using that money and reinvesting it in your users or somewhere. Right? You don't have to do paid, but generally having control over your user base is a good thing. Right? When I joined Square, most of our growth was organic. A huge portion of it. And that's great. Sometimes I show this as a faucet with no, no like a lever on the top. Right? No crank. That's what organic growth is like. People can say they know where it comes from. The reality is there's a hundred variables that go into that core product loop. Right? What happens if you break one of those pieces? Does your organic growth stop? What happens if you put that reader in a case? If you turn it a different color? If you stop sending receipts? Like, who knows what piece of this? Right? There's ten different variables right in that core product loop. So who knows what element breaks organic growth? I had no intention to cannibalize organic growth. I just wanted to put layers on top of it. So in the early days, you should be testing these channels, paid and otherwise, and saying, does it move the needle? Yes or no. Buy an errand. Right? This is like a two-week test. Is it going to work directionally? If yes, great. I'm going to keep doing it. If no, kill it. Ice it. Put it on the shelf. It's not saying you're never going to come back to it. You might. You're just saying, it's not good enough for me to care about right now. I'm in the early days. I've got to focus on the stuff that really is going to drive numbers for me. Right? You don't want one percent user acquisition channels for some long tail. At some point, you'll have the luxury when you have a huge company to worry about those little channels that all layer on top of each other. That's not today. So as you build to a more mid or late stage company, then you'll start to look like a sediment chart for your growth. Right? So in the early days, it's all about getting these three or four or two channels that are really driving users in. Maybe it's your referral program. Maybe it's some paid marketing. You've got some Facebook ads. Whatever it might be. In the long term, you're going to realize that it's like a sediment chart. Right? Those numbers get bigger. And now, at some point, when it was driving a thousand accounts and you thought that was a huge number that no longer seems like a big number, you may decide to kill that channel or maybe you'll decide to keep it. But it layers and you have more resources and you have more people and you can justify the operations. But every one of these channels takes some amount of mind share. There's some drag on the system. Right? So don't be too lenient on the paid channels or the unpaid channels. Focus on the ones that really move the needle. If they're not moving them, kill them in the early days. Right? Long term, you can worry about sediment charts. In these channels, how do you find them? Right? Where do you invest your time? The most common thing that people do is they ask, what's my competition doing? Right? You've probably all asked yourself this question. I'm building a site for moments where people take their photos and they're putting them all together. There's lots of companies that have thought about doing this. There's lots of companies that have done this. How did they get users? How did they gain mind share? How did they build a brand? What is everybody else doing? Maybe I can learn from them. I think that's a good thing. I think this idea of don't look at your competition, you know, I just focus on the road ahead and I'm just heads down on it, bullshit. I think you should look at what your competition's doing. You should look at what other people are doing. Learn from their mistakes. Learn from their successes. Right? Have a sense when you're going to market. There's no reason not to. Now, don't obsess over it. That's not all you can do. And I would modify this question a little bit. Instead of it being what is my competition doing, the people that I compete with to get to my target audience say, what is anyone doing that's effectively reaching my target market? Does that difference make sense to people? I don't care if they're selling shish kebabs and they're reaching your target market. They're reaching your target market. Why do you care what they're selling? Right? Sure, pass through the filter of what's my competition doing but more importantly the people that are most effectively reaching my target market what are they doing? What channels are they using? How can I do the things that they're doing? Could those things work for me? That starts to get into thinking in a way that might be different. Maybe you can find unique channels. Maybe you can find channels that work just for you and won't work for your competition or won't work for anyone else. So this is something that we did with retail at Square and we learned this lesson from Intuit, right? On the right you see QuickBooks. Intuit was one of the first people to go into stores with their software. Now why did they do this? Broadband had already come out. Their software wasn't terribly heavy. You know what you get in this big box? Well, you get a lot of space, a lot of air and then after you wade through the air you generally see these little like the paper is set to hold a CD or a USB drive and as storage has gotten smaller the amount of space you actually need inside that box is smaller and smaller and yet these boxes aren't getting any smaller. They're the same size. Sometimes they're larger. Now why the hell is that? Why would you have this huge box with a little thing inside of it? It's shopper marketing. Yeah. It's shopper marketing. It's marketing. I'm not putting that in there because they couldn't download it faster online and guess what? They can. I'm going to put it on my website too but I put it on a little USB stick and a little tiny pamphlet inside this big box because it turns out that people go to Staples and Office Max and Office Depot to buy receipt printer paper and to buy stuff for their cash register and to buy bubble wrap and to buy tape and all sorts of other things they need for their business and so if you're an SMB you go to those stores and there's not a lot of software competing for your attention. There's not a lot of accountants standing in the aisles trying to get your business. So Intuit said hey, we're going to go there. That's where our customers are. You know who's doing a killer job? Scotch Tape. Amazing. They never thought of them as a competitor but God, Scotch Tape was nailing it. Those small businesses were buying Scotch Tape tons of rolls of it, right? And they were getting it at Office Depot so they put their stuff at an end cap. They put their software in this box. They put those boxes on end cap. They marketed there. Turned out they have a totally different LTV than Scotch Tape does for their customer.

SPEAKER_116: So now they can go into the same channel and play by completely different rules.

SPEAKER_17: Totally different economics. It's the same end customer but they're selling them a totally different product. Right? And so it's really important to learn from those lessons. So we had this idea where we said hey, maybe we should put credit card readers in retail stores. And we wanted to start with thinking about well we'll do small businesses shop. It turned out we wanted to pilot it. So we piloted it with Apple stores. We were in about 200 stores so Apple has 260 stores something like this. We piloted it with them. And that seems a little crazy, right? Because everyone goes Apple stores not just small businesses. But one in ten people in the United States runs a small business. And the other nine out of ten certainly knows someone who runs a small business. So we started selling them as this accessory. And it sold like gangbusters. Right? We were generally the only reader in market. We were the first reader that was at Apple stores. And after we went to Apple stores we went to Best Buy and Office Max and Staples and Office Depot and Walgreens and Duane Reade and Home Depot. Why Home Depot? Well there's lots of builders and contractors that go in there. Turns out they have these invoice forms where you're billing your customer were right next to those invoice forms. Right? Why bill your customer? Do it electronically. Slide this through your card. Right? Plug it into your phone. So we're in 45,000 retail stores today. It's an incredibly effective channel. After we went into market and retail everyone copied us. Everyone went into market. Right? And we innovated on the package. This is like the third or fourth iteration of the package that we put into retail. Because it's all about the marketing. We would take pictures of what the accessories area looked like and look at the colors of their boxes to make sure we were standing out. To look at their taglines. We would learn from people selling headphones. So if you keep yourself in the mindset of my competition you'll fail to take in the greater perspective which is that's not what you're competing with. Your competition at an Apple store is everyone on the hooks next to you. Right? So there's a lot to be learned from looking at who's reaching your customer versus just who's competing with you for the same product. Retail was so successful for us that we then used it as a channel to launch Square Stand. Right? A much larger product a little bit more enterprise upmarket works really well for us. So in product I believe there are almost no new ideas. I get pitched all day every day people constantly send me their ideas for the companies they're building. It's generally this thing that I've heard of before with a slightly different twist or oh yeah I think there's five people that are competing or we're the this for that. But there's very very few new ideas if any. So first I'd start by learning from the world around you. I get almost all of my ideas by taking something that's over here and applying it over here in a way that other people didn't think of. Again when we think about those growth people if they're just quantitative they're not doing this. That's not the way their brain's thinking. They're not taking these creative ideas and applying them. So these are just a couple brands that I have learned from in my career. And I keep adding logos to this slide in my head. Now some of these brands oh yeah I've heard of that company Apple before and Bose but they might be unexpected right? like what did you learn from Southwest or what the hell is TreeTorn right? You can learn from brands big and small right? They do things that are really creative. So if I were to just bucket these into my groups in my head here's how I might bucket them. These are different things that you can learn from these brands. Bose never compromises on quality. It's amazing sound. Incredible sound right? And they thought to put this little business card holder in the top of the Bose Quiet Headphones. Have you guys seen that?

SPEAKER_132: Yes.

SPEAKER_17: Yeah? That business card holder has referral cards. It's quite aggressive. So literally you store your headphones in this case and you go and you sit down in your seat and the woman next to you says oh do those things really work? Yeah. Oh it's amazing. Can't hear actually you know I was just opening this and I saw there's these little cards here you go. You give them a card. One of the most low-tech referral programs ever created but it's there right? And there's some interesting stories behind Bose. So Bose started out the initial Quiet Headphones started out with a plug that only plugged into the airline's special adapter and you would plug it in so airlines have kind of evolved in how their audio sets work and they would sell them to the airlines at cost or even at a discount right? And they sold them to them for their first-class flyers. Now why the first-class flyers? They board first, they sit in their seat, they put those headphones on and they're your marketing impression for every other customer walking by. They're aspirational, I want to be like them, where do I get those? Right? And so they created this airline-only model and this consumer model. And they use the airlines as this creative marketing channel to say the flyers that fly the most that are in the best seats, that are having the best experience, they wear Bose Quiet Comfort headphones. So you think about these different creative elements that companies have used over time. Let's go to another one. Think if you look at Zappos on speed and service. Zappos created the model that everyone is rushing to catch up to today. So it doesn't matter if you sell shoes. You should learn from what they did and how they treated their customers. And probably my favorite example on here is Alcoholics Anonymous. What do you think I learned from Alcoholics Anonymous? I'm actually not an alcoholic, I've never been in an AA meeting, but what do you think I learned from them? these distributed communities? They literally give handbooks to people in community centers. They get them to create a fairly unified normalized system that gets people in and they have an incredible referral program. People go out into those communities, they bring other people in, they get those people to act as mentors, those mentors create content, that content is subscribed to by other people that come into the program, incredible retention rates and engagement, people come every week, right? So you can learn literally from every part of your world. I think about summer camp at YMCA, I think about MySpace, which I'll talk about in a minute. All of these things you can just go around in your life and take from these little experiences and then apply them to your business. So let's go through a couple examples. You guys know this guy, Tom? Yeah. So Tom was your friend on MySpace. And then literally every social product created copied them. And what did they copy? They copied the psychology. No one wants to go into an empty room. You join MySpace and you have a friend. Your friend's Tom, and he looks like this. This was his photo. Why isn't this a picture of a bot? Why isn't it a robot or a cartoon? Why is it a real person who's 32 years old who lives in Santa it's real? It's real. It's comfortable. Right? I don't have any friends with a robot. I feel like I'm all alone in this community. Right? And then Facebook one-upped them. And in their onboarding flow, they said, find your friends. Let's go ahead and bring your friends in. They didn't want you to have a cold start. So before you even got to your profile, back in the day where your profile was the thing where you spent your time because there was no news feed, you wanted to land on your profile and have your friends and start to organize it. And they made sure that you had friends when you first got there. And actually they used aimbots to get users into the system to begin with. And before that they used email address book importers. Right? And guess who else did that? Everyone. Everyone under the sun. Literally every social product ever created. So these tactics, these things that people do, I'm amazed how often I speak with people and they've got book ready. Okay, tell me those 10 tactics. What am I going to do to grow my company? Many of these tactics don't change. It's the same stuff. It's the same feelings. At the end of the day, product design and creation is about human psychology. And we're sort of the same, the same that we've always been. And we evolve a little bit. But the things that you do, the way we feel is what matters. Right? And so you can use these tactics, you can use many others to connect with people, to get them to feel the way they want to feel. That's all we're trying to do with product. Right? We're trying to satisfy a need, a want, a demand, a desire. So let's look at some other examples. Sometimes you've got to look at the box. What does your product come in? And this could be a virtual box. You can think about paperless post. How different is the paperless post experience from the evite experience? The packaging before you even get to the invite is awesome. You open that email, the envelope flies open, it lifts up, there's a liner, if they paid, if they didn't, you start to go, I don't know, maybe it's not such a good event. And so they have this really nice design. They put a lot of effort into that. And then you open it up and it pulls out, the envelope drops away and it zooms in and suddenly you're on the event page. Ta-da! You can do that with physical products as well. So these boxes, this is what everybody used to ship things in. And then people said, wait, that's a lost opportunity. Amazon took those boxes, they added their branding, still kind of boring, not super exciting, right? The U.S. Postal Service with Priority Mail, we're going to have white boxes. You see those white boxes in the lobby of your building, you see those white boxes anywhere, you know that they're the U.S. Postal Service. Well, Alice in Soap.com said, huh, color on boxes. Maybe we should put bright colors on boxes and put our branding on them and tell them our message. Now, why do you think they did this? I got this box. This isn't my picture, but I got a box that looked just like that from Alice when I worked at Google. Guess where that box got sent? To my desk. And it sat on my desk all day. I had about five different people come up to me. What the hell is Alice? Why is there a bright blue and black box on your desk? What does everybody needs an Alice mean? Then I realized that I

SPEAKER_12: felt very old in startup scene since I said, oh, it's from the Jetsons. And people said, what's the Jetsons? And I said, okay,

SPEAKER_116: fine. So the point is that it creates a conversation. This stuff's

SPEAKER_17: hard to measure. How do you measure this? Somebody goes and goes to Alice.com after they see this box on my desk, it's really hard to track. You should invest in it. So it's worth thinking about. Sometimes you have to rethink the product entirely. These are all different fans, Voronados, kind of a nicer version of this. This is pretending to be an old vintage version but really probably some nice restoration hardware one. And then Dyson came along and said, why would you put a blade in a fan? Kids are going to cut their hands. Why would you need that? You could rethink it entirely. And now when you see a bladeless fan, you know it's Dyson. They're the only people that do it. So sometimes you have to rethink the product experience altogether. So this last thing that I want to talk about is the lighter squishier side of growth. The surprising and delighting your users. Now why are you doing this? You're surprising and delighting them so that they'll talk about it. That's your end goal. And this is soft. It's harder to measure. It takes work. It takes the best products start conversations after they're utilized. So let's go through a couple examples. At Square we did this thing called the gift of Square around the holiday times. We just put silver foil print on our boxes. Same square reader inside but we made snowflakes. We wrapped them in the same snowflake gift wrap and we turned them into gifts that you might give to someone you know that has a small business. Sold over 25,000 units where people would come in and they would pay money for a gift wrapped square. At the time they were all free. All squares were free. And people loved it. They talked about it. This is so awesome and brilliant that well. You want to watch the ads. That's the panacea. Lift. This is a picture of this woman. I think her name is Ruth in LA. And I have actually been in her lift. When I got in all of a sudden these lights started to go. I was like what the hell is going on? She had trivial pursuit cars and they ask you trivia questions they take you to your destination and you can win money. I remember that experience. I've told multiple people about that experience. Turns out other people told people about the experience. It made a difference. You go over to Woot. For those of you that remember Woot before it got acquired, they added SaaS to product reviews. They made it funny. Then Groupon used that same tactic in their early deals with the fat cat that would sit there and write up the deals. This creative quirky marketing you wanted to send it because it was funny. Turns out you send it and some percentage will convert and buy that deal. Lastly, how many of put these keyboards on the stairs and when you would make music. They got 66% more people to take the stairs and they got 21 million views on YouTube of these videos. Little things. Little things. How many of you guys know what this is?

SPEAKER_172: Castro

SPEAKER_17: Sidewalk. Yeah. Thank you City of San Francisco. They rethought something, some that no one had ever thought about before. And I guarantee you, people were not taking pictures and talking about this experience. And yet, after they did this, people are all over Twitter sharing this. Go visit the Castro. Now, I'm going to really go out there on a limb. I would imagine that this makes a few people a day smile, take a picture, be in a better mood. And that might make them spend a little bit more money, reduce crime, look out for the neighborhood, care a little bit more, be a little bit more careful about crossing the street, pause, take a moment. Those things matter, right? And this is nothing that would have crossed my mind if I was doing urban planning and city development, like how do I make the neighborhood a little bit better, a little bit nicer? But they did a competition where they said submit your designs for what you want the crosswalks to look like. They got the community involved. And now everyone who was part of that feels like they own a little bit of the community, right? We're a little bit more invested, we care a little bit more, we're a little bit more on the lookout. And everyone who visits this neighborhood, they're also a little bit more integrated. Last example. So, this is a new version. All of you guys know what this is?

SPEAKER_175: Okay.

SPEAKER_17: So this is a new version of something that used to look like this. Now, what's interesting is nobody remembers the originators of this, right? So these are Virgin America safety videos. They start out with this animated one that was funny and quirky. And now if you fly any other airlines, you have to endure their really bad ripoff of Virgin America. It's horrible in most cases. So, people are trying. really bad attempts at just copying Virgin. But what's fascinating to me is that Virgin wasn't the one who made safety instruction funny. Southwest was. Way before Virgin, Southwest flight attendants were being videotaped and put on YouTube for saying all sorts of funny things. Please help yourself before assisting children or other passengers behaving like children who might be flying with you, right? We've all heard this. And you look at it, people rapping and dancing in the aisles and all this. Virgin didn't create this concept. But they were smart enough. This is the if you build it they will come. Well, they didn't, right? Southwest didn't get credit for it. They did get lots of views and people liked their brand but nowhere at the level that Virgin did. Virgin gets to own this thing that they didn't even create because they were smart enough to message it and market it. So, first they did it with animated. Then they said we're going to do a totally different take. We're going to take popular television celebrities. We're going to get everyone in here. We're going to put a jingle to it. Have a dance number. We're going to tap into what people want to see today. And it worked for them. They cut up this new video into pre-release segments. They previewed those segments so they would like tease their safety video online before they released it. This is not a blockbuster. They did a Times Square premiere of this video. This is crazy, right? And did it work? Well, they got 10 million views on YouTube. You start out your experience with this video. You sit down, you're cranky, you're running through the airport, you know, you got your bags and you just made in time and you're pissed off and somebody's sitting in your seat. And you sit down and there's this jingle that can't get out of your head and you can't help but tap your foot and you're smiling and it's fun and people are dancing and how can you not be in a good mood? And thank God for that because then the flight attendants have to deal with you for the next four hours, right?

SPEAKER_127: So they have happier customers that talk about their product that love the

SPEAKER_116: experience and they start the experience. This is like they're onboarding. This is an automated onboarding

SPEAKER_17: that puts everybody in a better mood. So this guy doesn't exist. There's no growth wizard, there's no elusive growth hacker that's going to do everything for you make all of your numbers go up and to the right. You've got to build the right product, you've got to effectively message it so people know what you're building and then you have to market it. And that's what this is all about, right? And the whole talk, all of this stuff is just lessons that I've learned but most of it is things that I've seen other people do really effectively and the best thing that I've learned is taking those lessons and incorporating them generally helps you. You shouldn't be starting from scratch. You should use lessons that other people have done, things that they've done in the past, mistakes, and then apply those to your business in a new creative way. That's what's worked for me and I hope it works for you guys. Thanks.