Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable)
Episode Date: September 1, 2022Yuriy Timen was Global Head of Marketing and Growth at Grammarly, and is now a full-time growth advisor, having worked with more than a dozen companies, including Canva, Airtable, Whimsical, Otter.ai,... Oyster, Flo Health, and Clay. In today’s episode, Yuriy discusses the ever-changing world of growth, emerging growth tactics, and how to find your growth engine. You’ll learn the most effective strategies for driving user acquisition, how to balance and diversify organic and paid channels, when it’s time to change plans, how to vet new growth channel opportunities, and much more.—Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/transform-your-subscription-growth—Where to find Yuriy Timen:• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuriytimen/• Twitter: https://twitter.com/thetimenator—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible:• Flatfile: https://www.flatfile.com/lenny• Modern Treasury: https://www.moderntreasury.com/• Eppo: https://www.geteppo.com/—Referenced:• Casey Winters: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caseywinters/• Elena Verna: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elenaverna/• Lyka Pet Food: https://lyka.com.au/• Ethan Smith’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanls/• Graphite: https://www.graphitehq.com/• Recast: https://getrecast.com/• Measured: https://www.measured.com/• INCRMNTAL: https://www.incrmntal.com/• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less: https://www.amazon.com/Essentialism-Disciplined-Pursuit-Greg-McKeown/dp/0804137382/• Man’s Search for Meaning: https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl/dp/0807014273/• The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz: https://www.amazon.com/Splendid-Vile-Churchill-Family-Defiance/dp/0385348711/• The All-In Podcast: https://www.allinpodcast.co/• Hustle: https://www.netflix.com/title/80242342• Mark Fiske at H.I.G.: https://higgrowth.com/team/mark-fiske/—In this episode, we cover:[03:49] Yuriy’s background[09:46] Different paths to growth for subscription-based products[13:21] When to lean into virality[15:39] What are network effects?[16:32] SEO strategy and timeline: how long can it take to see results?[24:22] The shifting landscape of paid media[28:09] The return of media mix modeling[32:01] How can you tell if media spending equates to business results?[33:44] Don’t spread yourself too thin[36:01] How to tell if you’ve taken a strategy far enough[38:02] When to lean into a strategy that’s working vs. when to think about diversification[42:13] Is there a shift from growth to survival?[46:19] Two reasons to do paid media[56:45] Why you shouldn’t dismiss TikTok (and other channels you might be overlooking)[59:36] Lightning round!—Production and marketing: https://penname.co/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe
Transcript
Discussion (0)
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Uri Timmin is a full-time advisor to companies looking to figure out their growth strategy.
And he's worked with companies like Canva, Airtable, Otter, Wimsycle, Hymns, Flow Health, and a dozen others.
I know a number of founders who have worked with Yuri, and they all tell me that he transformed how they think.
about their growth. Before becoming an advisor, he spent nine years at Grammarly where he led
growth in marketing and helped turn it into the household name that it is today. In our chat,
we get incredibly tactical about all of the ways that you can grow your product, including when
and how to invest in virality, SEO, and paid growth, what's changing across each of those channels,
and the most common failure modes for B to C startups. This is the most tactical and actionable
conversation I have had yet on how to grow your product, particularly a subscription product.
And I'm really excited for you to hear it. With that, I bring you, Yuri Timmon.
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Yuri, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for having you, ma'am.
This is great.
It's even better for me.
All right, all right.
So I'm going to give a quick bio.
Let me know if I missed anything really important.
You were head of growth at Grammarly.
You spent nine years there, kind of doing all the things that helped turn that company into the killer product that it is today.
You left that, I think, a couple years ago.
Now you're advising companies mostly full-time.
I think mostly on growth strategy and I think mostly consumer startups.
Is that about right?
A couple of super critical corrections.
Number one, it was only eight and a half years.
Okay.
Usually people round those up.
I'm impressed that you get active.
I figure eight and a half is long enough.
So I mean, yeah, I'm not sure I want to round their time.
I know, but I'm kidding, obviously.
Yeah, I mean, that's largely it.
I mean, you know, Gramily was a hell of a run and trying to take a step back from that.
And that stepping back is kind of taking on a life of its own, you know, vis-a-vis, advising.
How many companies have you worked with at this point advised?
And what are some examples just like companies people would know?
It's now been about, I guess, two years and three months since my last day at Gramerly
in an operating capacity.
I probably worked with maybe 15 companies in the last two and a little bit of years.
Obviously not all at once, right?
it's usually four to five at any given point in time.
But some of the ones that I've been really that I've really lucked out with in terms of,
I mean,
in terms of getting aligned with,
you know,
companies like Canva,
uh,
Airtable,
hymns and hers in the personal care space.
There is otter.
dot AI.
Who else?
Flow help,
uh,
you know,
the world's most downloaded period tracker.
I use that for my wife.
It's handy.
Good, good.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was trying to get my wife to try it out, but I'm not unsuccessful.
You're failing in your growth.
She was like, are you trying to push me to having a third kid?
I was like, no, no, I swear, it's just product testing.
Clever.
So I've had Casey Winters on this podcast and Elena Verna.
It's kind of like the three of you that it feels like have worked with the most companies as advisors.
And I don't know if there's some kind of contest you all have or anything, but
Do you think about that at all?
Is there anyone else out there that you think is in the running?
I mean, first of all, just being mentioned in the same breath as those two is an accolade in it of itself.
I mean, I look up to both of them.
They've gone first.
Also, I credit a lot of my getting started to both of them because they've been very generous with their
time when I was just kind of considering advising, especially Casey, if they listen to this huge
shoutout to both of them, but Casey especially, he's such a mensch when it comes to just being
generous for this time. So, no, there is no competition. But had there been one, I suspect I'd be in
lead right now because I've done it, I've done it in a shorter period of time. I've much newer to
advising than both of those. But no, I have a ton of that.
respect both of their phenomenal, what they do, and I learned a time from them.
I love that.
The acceleration is fastest.
Wow.
Sweet.
So we're going to talk a lot about consumer growth strategies and your experience
working with companies and a bunch of insights on things you've learned from working with
companies.
Before we get there, just one quick question on your advising.
I'm curious, how many companies do you work with at once normally?
Yeah.
So I've played around with different quantities.
So a couple of things.
So you mentioned, you alluded to earlier that I advise full-time.
What I'll say is that mostly the only thing that I do right now
professionally is advising, but it's not quite full-time.
I hard count my week at about three to three and a half days a week worth of work,
which is a personal choice.
And so that is a hard constraint that I'm working with.
And within that constraint, I also feel like for me to do my best work
and the work that I also enjoy the most and find the most fulfilling,
four to five companies is probably the max.
If I try to go beyond that,
the overhead that it creates in terms of the cost of context switching
just becomes overwhelming.
And I feel like I'm not showing up as best as I can with each individual company.
As an early plug or anti-plug, depending on how you answer this,
are you looking for more companies to work with right now?
Are you just like, don't even try?
I am so at capacity right now.
I'm so at capacity right now.
I've also just been, I've been very fortunate to always be at capacity.
But I think, you know, for every four to five companies that I'm working with,
you know, think of as a concentric circles, right?
There are another maybe 10 to a dozen companies that we're actively exploring
if we want to work together in the future.
and then there is another
consensurate circles
of maybe 30 plus
companies that I'm just friends with.
So I'll take the plug.
I'm always up for meeting
you know,
awesome founders working on important problems.
Cool.
While we're on the plug,
I guess,
how do people find you online?
What's your,
like Twitter?
I mean,
honestly,
probably,
probably through Lenny's podcast.
That's one.
But, you know,
honestly,
LinkedIn is really the only place.
I'm pretty low-key otherwise.
Okay, great.
There's a lot of meta stuff. So let's get into some meat stuff here. So you talk to a lot of consumer
startups. You help them figure out how to grow, how to evolve their product. Something I'm always
curious about, and I love your thoughts on, is when you look at a consumer startup, I imagine there's a few
archetypes of how they grow. And I'm curious if that's a mental model you use when you're like,
oh, I see company X. They're probably going to grow this way and here's what they should focus on.
How do you see that? Great question. I think there are a couple of ways to answer that.
My sweet spot is subscription companies.
And it's not just consumer, right?
I do work with a lot of BDP companies.
It's just not most of them.
What they all have in common is they lean into consumerized type of growth loops and growth motions.
Right.
So they're very self-serve in nature or have meaningful self-serve engines.
So if I think about subscription companies, I think there are, you know, probably a couple of deep buckets that I see them falling into.
Right. If you were able to nail your unit economics and you have really strong consumer LTVs, think grammarly, think Canva.
The single player LTVs for those companies are very, very high. They're kind of like average S&B LTVs for B2B companies.
What's like a number there just for folks to have a little context?
I'm not at liberty to speak to those, but but we're talking like.
Like in the hundreds of dollars, right?
Whereas some other, like most consumer subscription companies that are like $5 to $7 a month,
their LTVs typically cap out at like 50 to 60 bucks.
Right.
And so if you have really healthy LTVs and that usually means that you're attracting
a pro-sumer buyer, so they may be single player, but they're using it for work.
Right.
And so maybe they're expensing it or just the perceived value so much higher that they're willing
to bear that.
you know, $120, $130 a year subscription.
If I'm seeing things like that and I'm seeing that you're converting,
you know, seven, like five plus percent of your free users to a paid subscriber,
then there is a big opportunity to play paid, right?
And lean into kind of paid, paid growth loops and paid acquisition loops.
There is another archetype, which is, you know, if there are network effects,
for instance, you don't find it as much with kind of like, you,
you know, single-player consumer subscription subscription companies,
but obviously, you know, social media, consumer companies,
there may be a strong referral angle, viral loop angle,
if the utility increases, the utility of the product increases,
the more users are using it.
Another archetype I see are companies that can lead into SEO very heavily,
especially if there is like a long-tail programmatic angle.
Take Canva, for instance, right?
their biggest initial growth loop,
and I think this is public knowledge,
was their long-tail SEO strategy,
where any kind of design project that you could think of,
you know, you would search for designing,
it's kind of like two categories of keywords,
make keywords and template keywords,
if you're searching for a template of any kind,
a wedding invitation, yada,
they had incredibly strong SEO,
and they were just,
capitalizing on all that long-tail traffic.
Not every product is going to lend itself to that.
But I always look for that early on,
because you can build an incredible moat with that kind of strategy.
That makes sense.
There's kind of like these three engines that you can tap into.
And I imagine the preference would be word of mouth virality,
and then if that isn't going to work, SEO,
and if that isn't going to work paid,
maybe just to kind of simplify it for listeners,
What are kind of signals you can go after virality and invest in that and think that that could work?
Because every founder would be like, yes, virality.
That's how I'm going to grow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, I mean, look, honestly, the first thing you look for is that is there inherent product network effects?
It's something that it's either there where it isn't from inception, from my experience.
I think it's very difficult to manufacture.
I mean, you know, it's very hard to manufacture, you know, it's very hard to manufacture, you know, product, network,
effects if they aren't there from the get-go, right?
So, you know, like Airbnb from your days, obviously, you know, marketplace, very
strong product network effect dynamics.
You think of, you know, collaboration tools, Airtable, Monday.com, whimsical, whom we both know,
very strong inherent product network effects.
Contrast that with a company like grammar.
It just wasn't there.
It's not an inherently multiplayer task, you know,
constructive communication.
And so you can try to engineer that,
but for my experience, it's an uphill battle.
So if you have inherent product network effects,
that's when I think layering on referral loops and viral loops,
you think about what Dropbox has done around file sharing,
like that's an iconic example, then it's really powerful.
I think that there is another case where referral and viral loops can
even when they're already inherent network effects.
If you have a really beloved product, beloved brand,
there's a company out of Australia that I have an opportunity to invest in called Delica.
They like fresh dog food subscriptions.
And incredibly beloved brand, a premium product.
And so they're able to lean into kind of a give one, get one referrals.
Even though there isn't an inherent product network effects,
they're still able to kind of generate meaningful results,
off of an incentivized referral program.
When you talk about network effects,
what does that mean to you?
How would you kind of define that briefly?
Yeah.
Yeah, to me, I mean, honestly,
I defined it in, I think,
probably a pretty quintessential way,
which is for every individual user,
the utility that they derive from the product
increases the more users there are on the platform.
The expanded version of that is,
you know, in the case of marketplaces,
it may not be the more users,
broadly speaking,
but the more users in the markets that you care about, right?
In the case of collaboration tools,
it's not the more users in abstract terms.
It's the more users within your team,
the more users within your company, right?
That correlates with the rise in your utility curve.
Awesome.
So if you have,
network effects, aka if the product becomes more useful with more people, or there's amazing
word of mouth already, or there's collaboration, probably a good sign that you could lean into
virality, maybe referrals. What about SEO?
Oh, that's a good one. It's a very, it's a very timely question because I actually, in a process
of we're helping a couple of, a couple of my companies figure out if it's the right time to
invest in SEO. So I've been sort of like a forefront.
of taking like exploratory meetings with agencies and SEO consultants and things like that.
I mean, I would say the first thing to figure, I mean, there are a couple of pillars, right?
Because obviously we all know that SEO has a different, a different return horizon than, say, paid acquisition, right?
It's longer out.
It's maybe six months is the earliest you can see results.
And even then, it's going to be a small trickle that compounds on.
or type, if you're successful, or you may spend three to six months leaning into an SEO
strategy and then realize that it's not going to back out typically, at least in historically,
a company probably is like Series B before it starts feeling like it has the luxury of making
these kind of medium to long-term investments. But I think that's shifting right now, but that's
maybe a topic for later or even for another thought, but a lot of the strategies that I think
where reserved for like Series B are trickling down to Series A companies because they have to
diversify away for paid, but maybe more on that later.
So I think with SEO, it's like the first pillar I would say is, do you have a unique
angle?
When you take a look at the SEO landscape today, you look at editorial landscape, which is
typically like how to searches and who are the players there?
and what kind of information is being offered.
Do you have something unique to contribute to that conversation?
Another thing that's, if I had to do like an audit checklist,
the other thing is like, do you have a unique programmatic angle?
Right?
Like, for instance, like, can't but did that with templates.
You know, who else is programmatic?
You know, CEL, Red Fit, like obviously, all the real estate, right?
That's like really strong.
ZAPIA, right.
So do you have a programmatic angle?
And then understanding the competitive land.
or the other one is do you have a unique data angle?
So for instance, a company I work with called Monarch Money,
which is in the personal finance management space.
Think of it as like a new and improved version of Mint.
There is a lot of users are connecting accounts and you kind of have a sense of spending patterns
and things like that.
Clearly there is a unique, unique data.
And so it's a question of can you turn it
into some kind of valuable organic search experience.
I won't go into too much detail in terms of what we're thinking of there,
but that's another checkbox.
If you can check two of three of those boxes, right,
as like a back of the envelope freight work, you may be in good shape.
And then it's a question of like,
how can you lower the cost of experimentation SEO as much as possible?
I think as a little dull, like if you can time,
box it to three months. Like, what can I do that at the end of three months? I know, like,
is this like little work or not? Awesome. A couple of follow-up questions. Absolutely.
One is SEO feels like this dark art where you need some SEO wizard to come help you through
this. Do you suggest companies find somebody or work with an agency or something else? Like,
what's your general feeling on agency versus some other route? I think,
SEO is pretty specialized skill set.
There are some basic principles that always hold, right?
Like best content wins, right?
And don't do, don't do like shady backlinking, right?
And make sure that you're on page.
SEO is good and your pages are easily crawl.
But, you know, I feel like everybody knows that.
And where the winners are determined are,
are between the lines.
Is that a sports analogy?
Maybe.
Between the lines.
I don't know what that comes from.
I don't know.
What I mean is that there is a lot of more nuanced SEO developments and angles
where I think is where the opportunity really lies to differentiate yourself.
And that requires keeping up with the latest algorithm changes.
It's very hard to do that unless you are.
are specializing in the art, right, or the black magic of SEO.
And so that's why I think getting an outside resource, at least for like an audit,
is really helpful.
Now, whether it's a boutique agency or, you know, a solo consultant, I think that's,
that's more circumstantial.
But I've found, like, you know, at least with the companies that I've worked with,
if we wanted to quickly vet the SEO opportunity, like, I can do it in a very kind of
amateur, at an amateur level, right?
like plug things into like similar web and trying to figure out the opportunity is there.
But you can get these relatively inexpensive audits done from companies that you can then
choose, do I hire them to help with my SEO or not?
But I think that audit is usually a very good use of time because they have templates.
So what they can turn around, you know, for 5 to 10K would take you many, many human
hours to try to pull together yourself.
Awesome.
Are there agencies that you want to name that people can go check?
out, or would you prefer just to keep it from having a favorite?
I'll give one plug.
Great.
I think one of the most innovative, disciplined, first principles, SEO thinkers and I've met is
Ethan Smith from Graphite.
It's not for everyone.
It's a pretty high-end SEO shop.
So I wouldn't send the Series A company there.
But Ethan also produces a lot of resources.
And what they've been focusing on at Graphite lately,
has been actually automating a lot of their work and turning it into SaaS.
So I don't know how far along they are, but you could probably already get, you know,
into some of their betas, some of the tools that they're offering.
Sweet.
I'm going to try to get Ethan on this podcast.
Yeah, yeah.
I've seen stuff and it's awesome.
Yeah, he's a math scientist when it comes to SEO.
Yeah.
We need, we need those, we need mad scientists on the ship.
Right.
Okay.
So we've talked about virality, talked about SEO, paid.
I imagine that's pretty straightforward.
If your LTVs are high enough and you can pay back ads on those, then that's where you go.
I imagine everyone can try it.
It doesn't work for everyone.
What if, yeah, anything you want to add there?
I mean, there's a lot.
There's a lot to add.
I mean, I don't know how deep you want to go down to paid rabbit hole because it's changing.
It's probably the most affected growth bucket in light of, you know, the market turbulence, you know, the venture center.
shifting. I've seen
paying acquisition
strategies and budgets
bear the brunt of that
fallout.
And so the question is, you know,
where do you want to go there?
Yeah, that's a really good topic. I was saving that for later,
but let's chat about it right now. And I imagine
part of this is Apple's tracking changes too.
So I guess my big question is like,
is paid still lucrative and a good path for
many companies is like 50% of the time less
effective. How do you,
How do you see that shifting recently and how should people think about paid in the consumer subscription startup?
Well, I think in the short term, let's break it down into phases.
I think in a short term, paid acquisition and just paid media dollars are contracted.
And we're seeing it already, right, with Meta's advertising revenue, snaps advertising revenue, right?
There's clearly a global contraction happening to paid media budgets.
A big part of it is because all of a sudden the definition of efficient acquisition and good payback windows is shifting.
Right.
So if before for a consumer subscription company, you know, 12-month payback was decent.
Now it's like you better pay back.
You paid media in six months or less.
That's the sentiment.
So, you know, the obvious reaction is like anything that's north of six months or well north of six months, we're cutting that.
And so there's that.
then there is just less tolerance for ambiguity and attribution, right?
When it's like, when the sentiment is like, let's grow at any, you know, grow at all costs.
If you can't attribute things perfectly, that's okay.
Now it's like, you know, especially with venture back companies, you have to have, you know, two plus years of runway,
manage your burn a lot more diligently now.
And so whatever you can't attribute sales to, like, that shit's got to go.
I don't know if it can curse on the pot or not.
I'm fully available.
Well, I've been holding back for the last 30 minutes.
No, I'm kidding.
Let loose.
All right.
Not kid friendly, but nobody's cursed yet.
So this could be.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
All right.
All right.
But anyways, yeah.
So I think there is a short, a short term contraction.
However, that opens up an opportunity for smart kind of attribution investments.
So you're seeing an emergence of some interesting.
attribution related, attribution
and criminality related products,
a couple that I personally
started exploring and looking into,
and then you just see a lot more
heads of growth, heads of user
acquisition, thinking
about attribution, building
their attribution stacks.
And so I think that once
we settle into some kind of
new normal, which is going to
be a combination of
just
better attribution
attribution stack on average for companies,
combined with just the level of acceptance
that attribution will never be as good as it maybe once was.
We're going to probably get, you know, hit,
like come out of that and you'll see paid budgets
start making their way back.
But even right now, during contraction,
there are going to be some winners.
The companies that had strong cash positions,
had strong new economics, strong pay back periods already, right?
Grammarly, Kamba, to name two that I know personally, a couple of others, or many others, probably,
they're going to be winners because all of a sudden, if previously they were competing with companies
who were nowhere as efficient as them, but for whatever reason had the green light to keep spending,
right?
Now all of those are going to pull back their budgets, and so those that have been disciplined,
have the instrumentation to track things better than,
that then average, they're going to benefit from, you know, decrease competition on app platforms,
decreasing CPMs, et cetera.
So they're going to do winners for sure.
Wow.
I haven't heard this perspective.
It's so interesting that the fact that it's gotten harder was creating new opportunities for
companies to do it better and more intelligently.
You said you mentioned a couple tools, products that you found to be potentially helpful
in this.
Is there anything you could mention there?
Yeah, yeah.
I mentioned a couple that I've kind of connected with in the last couple of months.
So, first of all, media-vix modeling is making it come back, which is something that got popularized in the madman kind of advertising era of the 50s, right, pre-digital.
And that's how people, that was basically the methodology.
I can't speak to the specifics there.
The science is a little bit, you know, I'm out of depth there.
But it was basically a way to use some data to determine a budget allocation across,
channels, right, at the time, it was probably, you know, newspapers and billboards, etc.
It was leveraging data to some extent.
You were probably doing it maybe on a quarterly basis.
And then you would only update it every quarter.
There was no way, with media mix modeling, there was no way to adjust budget like in quarter,
because you weren't getting the data feedback loop that frequently.
But media mixed modeling is not making a comeback because there are so many offline channels
that are part of folks' channel portfolio today.
And then plus, a lot of the online chain.
analysts are becoming less trackable, right?
Meta, for instance, right, with iOS 14 shift.
And so media mixed monelings are you going to come back.
And the company that's leading to charge of bringing the media mixed modeling methodology
of like the traditional advertising era and ushering it into the digital world is a company
called the recast.
Recast.
Recast.
Yeah.
So I've heard really good things.
I haven't tried them with any of my companies yet, but there are a couple, a couple of
that are on the horizon, hopefully.
Just to double click there for a moment, is that still useful if you're not doing TV and other
fortunes of advertising?
I think it's still, you're just doing it.
Yeah, I think it's useful if you're spending a considerable amount, what's considerable.
I'd say north of $100,000 a month, a bit media.
And if you have some level of channel complexity, so you're not just like Google or a Facebook,
but maybe you're on three plus channels, then I think it still makes sense.
The other ones in the incrementality space, they'd have to be.
very different methodologies, you know, actually, because at the time of the day, this may be obvious to folks,
but maybe some will find value.
Click-based attribution, right?
Or the digital attribution, we were all fawning over cookie-based and click-based, and URL-parameter-based attribution.
It never demonstrated a causal relationship between our media spend and business results.
It was only good for correlative insights, right?
And the only way to determine causality is through real, you know, controlled experiments,
randomized control experiments through incrementality testing, which is typically really hard to do
cleanly.
And also companies have always been, often been wary about doing it because you have to, like,
turn off a channel, potentially in a key demo.
And you're like, yeah, like, the benefit is the learning of whether it's actually incremental,
but the cost or the sales that I will lose today.
But the only way to really know
how effective your paid media is
is through ongoing incrementality testing.
So there are two companies that are addressing that,
two that I'm excited about.
One is measured.
Can be found at measured.com.
Amazing domain name.
Amazing domain name.
Go with them.
And then the other one is incremental.
But incremental, no vows.
except the last A between the T and the L.
Excellent.
Great job.
So many free plugs today.
Yeah.
I love it.
It's great.
This is what people need, right?
They're just like, okay, what do I actually do?
And so the more it's clear what to actually try and how to solve these problems,
the more people can actually make change.
I had a couple of questions here that I wanted to follow up on.
One is founders might be listening to this and they're like,
amazing.
Okay.
we're going to grow. There's three ways to grow. Let's do it all. Let's get someone on
SEO. Let's get Jane on paid. Let's get Fred on virality. There you go. So in your
experience, is it smart to focus on one and then expand down the road or try them all?
See which one works best. How do you advise companies think about these options?
I would say focus paired with rapid iterations.
Right.
With limited resources, naturally, you have to practice some form of essentialism and ruthless
prioritization.
But at the same time, the clock is always ticking, right?
You have burned.
There is a finite number of tries that you have at finding what works, right?
What's going to help you unlock the next level of growth, right?
Get to the next funding round, right?
to extend your runway.
And so I think either one taking to an extreme focus
or trying multiple things is not a good thing.
And just the case it's not obvious, right?
If you focus on one thing and it ends up being the wrong thing,
you've wasted really valuable time,
and now you have so much less time left to find something that does work.
Spreading yourself very thin, oftentimes, you know,
in the early stage companies, it's one person who's in charge of all of growth
but they also have some other kind of responsibilities
like maybe ops and customer success,
right?
If you get them to try like five different things,
they may not try them fully,
anyone individual with fully enough, right?
Because I like to say the only thing that's worse
than a channel or a tactic that you tried not working,
the only thing that's worse than that
is when you didn't give it the appropriate shot, right?
And you prematurely or erroneously concluded that it doesn't work.
And it's remarkable how often you find that to be the case when I talk to companies.
Oh, YouTube, we tried it.
It doesn't work.
I'm like, okay, can I see what you've tried?
And then you look at it.
You're like, oh, this thing was not designed to even have a shock networking from the get-go.
So to answer your question, I think it's focus with some guardrails so that you
know exactly when it's time to move on to the next thing.
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This might be too hard to answer in a chat like this, but you have any guidance for how to know when you've gone far enough?
I imagine there's a lot of nuance in detail there.
Does there anything that you could share?
Love the question.
It's very thought-provoking.
I think with some tactics and some tactics.
channels, you can fairly objectively create some test guardrails where it's like, if it's YouTube,
we know kind of like minimum number of impressions that you got to get.
You know, try two to three creative angles.
Here's the click-through rate range that you're looking for.
Like, you know, if you're getting within these ranges on these KPIs, keep going.
if you don't abandon.
I think it's important to also know that abandon them doesn't mean we will never revisit it yet.
Right.
It just means that because every time you're evaluating, right, the concept of sunk costs, right?
So you have these periodic, I think, periods of revaluation where it's like, okay, did we, did we try enough?
What is, and this is more art than science, frankly.
It's like, what's the incremental lift for us as a team to try to,
experiment with the next phase of this channel or this tactic.
And what is the opportunity cost of that?
What are the other high-profile things that we could be trying?
I know you were right and safe.
It's probably too hard to answer in this format.
But I would break things down maybe into two types.
There are some channels or tactics where you can objectively figure out
like some guardrails for when you know it's showing promise or not.
because you can pull benchmarks on like good click-through rates and things like that, right?
Then there are other tactics where you just have to exercise more judgment outside benchmarks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That was actually really valuable and a very challenging question to try to summarize quickly.
So thank you.
One more quick question along these lines.
So you talked about these three broad ways companies grow.
Oftentimes a couple of them work.
Something I've seen, and I'm curious if you agree, usually one is like 80.
percent of your growth and then you layer on a couple more to optimize.
Is that what you see?
Yes.
I think companies that we know and admire and a reference in case studies or in podcasts such
as this one, from the outside looking in, you oftentimes assume that it's a highly
diversified growth engine.
I have to say it's often not the case.
Definitely the 8 and 20 applies.
There is a kind of strategy that's working overwhelmingly well,
and there is a scramble internally to minimize reliance on that one thing.
And on Discover slash Unlock, the next step function,
the next growth horizon.
In the case of Grammarly, it was performance marketing,
kind of over-reliance and performance marketing during, you know,
part of the company's life cycle.
And so it was like, okay, this thing is working.
It's efficient.
So you don't want to stop pouring fire on it.
But you're also thinking, you know, months and years ahead,
you know, what kind of risk does it open you up to?
And so there is a scramble to fight.
And Gravially has been successful there.
You know, with Canva, it was the essence.
SEO angle, right?
So for them, that was working really well, which is more defensible than paid, right?
That's sort of like long-tailed programmatic SEO angle.
But look, you're always susceptible to Google algorithm updates, right?
And so how do you need to risk yourself from that?
But to your point, yes.
And I think that surprising thing to people probably is that it's also the case with some
later stage companies.
It's not just early stage companies that are kind of like what-trick ponies.
Sometimes it's later stage companies,
as well.
But this makes me think about it is there's kind of these three phases to growth.
There's the kickstart phase where you're just doing a bunch of stuff, trying to get things
moving.
Then there's that you discover your first main growth engine.
And then there's layer on additional engines because you want to diversify.
Yep.
And one interesting, what I believe is an interesting period.
And a lot of it is gut feel, right?
And I try to threat companies.
Like I encounter sometimes early stage companies when one thing is working well.
and they're already worried about overreliance,
and they're starting to talk about diversification.
And I come in oftentimes.
And I see showing up in their OCRs.
I'm like, no, no, too early.
Like, I'm glad that you're such a forward thinker.
Put all of your energy.
Like, sure, this one tactic is accounting for, say,
80 plus percent of your new user acquisition,
but your user acquisition is still small, right?
So, like, don't get to,
with diversification, we'll get there, lean more into this, hit this growth rates,
like stand this up, build this into a real strategic advantage, this thing that's working.
So I actually have to talk them out of focusing on diversification too early.
Contrast out with some later stage companies who are at scale, I don't know, 50 plus million
ARR, 90 plus percent reliant on a single acquisition channel, which is just, you know, mired with risk.
And diversification is a blind spot for them.
And then with those, I have to be like, hey, y'all, here's a risk that you're carrying.
Right.
Let's start carving out bandwidth resources to try to go and explore these other channels of tactics.
That's such an important point.
It reminds me, Casey has this hilarious line that he uses that the money is always in the banana stand.
Or there's always more money in the banana stand from arrest of development.
That basically your growth is probably going to come from the same place that's already come from.
And that you shouldn't take never granted.
you should put most of your efforts into continuing to optimize that versus being distracted by,
oh, let's do SEO now.
I see that argued.
For sure.
So you mentioned at this point about how later stage growth strategies are starting to move
earlier into growth strategy planning.
I'd love to hear more on that.
Yeah, let me expand on that.
In the world that we lived in in the last 18 months, or let's say up until, say, three to five months ago, right?
We're living in the world where funding was abundant and plentiful.
Startups were conditioned to think that they can raise twice a year.
Valuations were quintupling within a year.
Like you raise in January and then you raise in November and your valuation 5x.
And so companies were coming off of these ridiculous series A's of like 15 to $25 million
dollar A's, and they were like, we got to grow as quickly as possible.
What can we activate to give us immediate return?
And the answer is almost always paid.
That's what's going to give you, especially if you're thinking you want to go back to raising,
you know, less than 12 months later, that forces you to focus on very kind of short-term
tactics, short payoff tactics.
And so things like SEO, there was no, there was no rule.
to think about that for early stage companies.
Because like payoff is going to come like, you know,
maybe in like 12 months in terms of meaningful payoff.
We care about getting to the next round
and maximizing our valuation between now and then.
SEO is for the grown-up companies, right?
When were that, we can think about it.
And they were getting this reinforcement from everywhere,
from peers, from VCs.
It's like it's growth, growth, growth, right?
The growth at any loss.
I think what happened now, and we'll see where it gets stabilized because I think we're still in the midst of a little bit of chaos.
What's happening now is the same DCs, right, are saying, okay, it's now survival.
You have to extend your runway, minimize burn, you know, hybrid if you have to.
And all of a sudden, growth, whether explicitly or, you know, via inference, becomes kind of a secondary objective.
for all these companies that are far from being cash flow positive, right?
They have to figure out how to stay alive, but not have to go back to the market and be sort of a victim of shitty terms.
And so I feel this is me extrapolating because venture capitalists didn't actually tell me this.
But I'm extrapolating that growth is a secondary objective now.
It's really focusing on sustainability due to economics, except the runway control of your destiny, get into default alive.
right?
And all of a sudden, it's like,
plus paid is a lot less attractive.
Now we can't afford to be acquiring users at like LTV cap one to one.
Right?
Like that's now a no-no.
And so SEO is now becoming more attractive because you're like,
once you got your burn under control and you're thinking,
okay, we saved all this money by reducing our paid budget,
or cutting it entirely.
like how do we put some of those resources back to work?
And all of a sudden, SEO starts looking a lot more lucrative.
Because it's almost like you took the urgency of like grow at any cost in the next six months.
You took that out of the equation.
So now it's like we're in a position where we're going to, you know, we don't have to go back to raising, you know, 18, 24 months.
We have, you know, 18, 24 months worth of runway.
And now companies are starting to think more in terms of, you know, building more sort of sustainable and defensible growth initiatives.
Fascinating. And as much as people may want to do SEO, like we talked about earlier, it doesn't mean they will be able to pull it off, right? Because there's these things that have to be true for your type of company.
Yes.
Yes. Going back to a point you made earlier about paid being a really interesting opportunity right now because it's become harder. Would you say generally you're kind of like pro, try paid, go paid.
in this time because I'm finding a lot of startups are like, oh, we can't do paid anymore.
We're trying to all these other approaches to grow.
Is that like alpha right now?
Start thinking about paid in a creative way and maybe this is going to be a huge advantage.
So there are two reasons to pay.
I mean, I'm oversimplifying, but I think people will hopefully appreciate the oversimification.
Number one, because it actually drives returns at efficient unit economics, whatever that may mean for your company,
your business, your industry.
The other way to do it is because it's a very quick way to get learnings on messaging,
on designs, on features you're thinking of launching, et cetera.
It's hard to get faster learnings at scale, right, than like AP testing headlines,
Google search or whatever.
I think the problem that I find is when a company can't have much camper in, right?
Or when you try to say that they're in both, but really it's like, okay,
you're funneling $100K a month.
It's like super inefficient and you're not even like running experiments to actually get the learnings.
I can assess a company, like even if I don't know the industry as well,
based on like just seeing their funnel performance, right, their conversion rates,
their retention curves, their LTVs, understanding their churn.
I could say whether they stand the chance at making paid work as a former strategy, right?
So not just a learning mechanism, not just kind of a feedback engine, but actually a profitable
at delivering acquisition channel or strategy.
And if I see that they're not there, because the funnel doesn't convert well, the users
don't retain, the LDs are too low, then I say, hey, it's not time for paid.
Maybe carve on a little bit of budget if you want to quickly test, you know, positioning and things
like that, but it's just too soon.
But if instead I account for a company as really healthy conversion rates, strong LTVs,
I do a little bit of competitor research, and I can see where the opportunities are,
which channels are less saturated than others, then I may say, hey, it's worth it, it's worth a go.
And also just seeing the bigger picture of their financial health, how much runway do you
out, right?
What is your, you know, what is your monthly burden will play?
Right, because paid is like cash going out the door and it will return, hopefully,
at some point might be six months, might be year.
And so that's a real constraint.
You mentioned onboarding and funnel conversion.
Two questions there.
One, do you have kind of a heuristic of like,
here's good for conversion rates?
Those are something that you think about there that you could share?
Or is it very case-dependent?
I think it's case-dependent, but, you know,
it is not in case-dependent.
It's category-dependent, right?
So it's not that every company is so-case,
but it's like, we've got to know about what buckets we're talking about, right?
I will say that it, let's say we talk about pro-sumer premium saps a la grammarly,
a la Canva, Wimickel, In Video, things like that.
Yeah, I can probably, I can confidently say that like a healthy, you know,
website visit to a free user, a free account creation conversion rate.
It's probably like in that 20 to 35% range.
From landing on the site to signing up.
from landing on site to like a Freed user.
At scale, earlier stage,
if you have really strong product market fit
with some kind of small audience segment,
that conversion can be 40 to 50%.
But as you go broader,
it will probably asymptote at like 25, 30%.
What about like a conversion,
you know, if you're a freemium from like a free user
to a premium account or a paying account?
I think anything under 5%
is not going to
it's not going to work long term
regardless of how big your top of funnel is.
You may get to soft one,
but for you to remain an independent company
continuously growing,
you know, pre-IPO,
like I don't think it's going to happen.
It's got to be north of 5%.
Ideally, like, north of 7%.
Wow. Super handy.
On the onboarding point,
What's your thoughts on investing and onboarding and that part of the flow?
How often is that a fruitful area of investment?
Almost always.
A lot of my work is in that sort of a resumer space.
So the products tend to be more complex, right?
Air table, whimsical, Canva, video, right?
They're very robust products.
And so it's very easy to get lost in their editors.
And I think what all of those companies are trying to do for their respective verticals
and use cases is they're trying to democratize access to, you know, things that previously
you have to rely on professionals for.
Maybe, in the case of Airtable, it's your engineers, right?
In the case of Canva, it is professional graphic designers.
In a case of in video, it's professional video editors.
So when I try to democratize actors, but they're also trying to make the products robust enough to be comparable to a professional grade quality.
And it's a very difficult place to play it.
It's like, how do you make it simple enough?
where a non-professional can use it,
but robust enough where they go and say,
oh, yeah, this is as good as if I wouldn't have hired a professional fill in the blame.
And that's where onboarding, sorry for the long-width answer.
That's where onboarding is really, really important
because there's such a huge difference between landing someone on that initial editor page,
being at Airtable, Canva, having them, you know, left with their own devices.
versus getting as much information or as much relevant information up front,
and then customizing that landing experience for them,
so that if they're there to do X and we know X, Y, Z about them,
we're able to guide them and not expose them to the robustness of the product all at once.
So the short answer is almost all the time, onboarding is a big opportunity.
Awesome.
That's what I was expecting to hear,
to give folks some context,
what's kind of an order of magnitude
that you've seen improvement on onboarding
and maybe impact on a company,
improving onboarding?
Earlier stage companies
where you still haven't really
approached the local maximum,
but you haven't experimented
with the top things.
I mean, you can
2 to 4X activation rates
easily through onboarding.
I think later stage companies,
like maybe
series B yet beyond,
I think you can still probably get to 20 to 30% lift and activations.
It depends on how many low-hanging fruit are left to tackle.
That makes sense.
Yeah, TLDR, onboarding, there's always money in the onboarding banana stand.
On that kind of same idea, do you have a general feeling of like investments in this stuff often pays off and helps you grow and is often higher ROI?
And investments in Bucket B are rarely successful.
What would those two buckets be?
So thinking of investments wrongly, right?
Not just monetarily.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Time and resources.
Yeah.
I mean, I would say that getting to know your customer always pays off.
So it's, you know, user interviews and getting to know your market, right?
Your customers and your prospects always pays off.
Customer research, inside surveying, interviewing,
you know, panels
incredibly useful.
And I found it to be very,
especially in early stages.
The amount of clarity and momentum
that it can create inside of a,
you know,
C, Series A,
up to Series B company.
When you first do some proper research push,
the way it can galvanize the team
and give them focus
and clarity and purpose is remarkable.
So that always pays off.
What doesn't pay off?
I mean, I think,
I think overreliance on paid.
It comes to bite you in the rear end.
I think what I think about tracking an attribution,
I think it's a question of like the right level of investment at the right stage.
Rarely to companies get it right.
They usually fall into one of two buckets where they underinvest in attribution.
And they are now, you know, their budgets are high.
They have a broad channel portfolio.
Leo and they have a hard time figuring out what's working, what isn't, and they just get into
this inertia.
It's like, well, overall, the company's been growing, and it's been growing roughly over the same
time that we've been increasing our spend, we're scared to break it.
So we're just going to keep spending, right?
Or companies that read horror stories about other companies over spending, they sometimes
try to invest in attribution too much, believe it or not, where
they're trying to get everything perfect and scientifically pure,
but what they don't realize is that the payoff may not always be there.
And so how do I fit this into your question of,
I think attribution tracking attribution in criminality
is definitely a worthwhile investment arena,
but it can both be a good or bad thing depending on the level.
So you've got to make sure the level investment is appropriate for your state.
when you stand to gain for me.
Awesome.
You're such a good interviewee
that you come back to the question.
No practice.
I promise.
That's great.
Okay, one last question before we get to our very exciting lightning round.
I'd love you to get your thoughts on advertising on TikTok and YouTube and broadly.
Is there any other tactics, avenues that you think are kind of underutilized or emerging that folks should be thinking about?
So TikTok, like definitely.
One thing I'll say about TikTok is I'm seeing.
you come up more and more because a channel that works well and sometimes even the most efficient
digital channel for some brands. But I think that the thing about TikTok that oftentimes I was
surprised about is you often hear, oh, TikTok, that's for the 15 to 22 year olds, right? I'm down
with my Jen Z, right? And oh, my audience is different. So I'm just going to ignore the channel.
TikTok has so many users and it's still so relatively unsaturated with advertisers that like your audience is on there.
You'd be surprised.
Like, you know, I've worked with brands that, you know, their core demo is like 40 plus married, you know, making 200K plus in household annual income.
And you wouldn't think that that demo is on TikTok and it is.
That's what we'll put it
What about TikTok
Other other channels
I mean I think
Out of Home
Is still not getting enough love
Podcasts
Okay
Yeah yeah
Sponsor this one
There we go
You heard it from your
Direct mail
What has happened
They've gotten better
With Attribution
Because before a lot of them
A lot of those channels
Were written off
As sort of like
Look
Attribus was just too hard in there
and attribution is so good and reliable on digital.
So that gap, that canyon that existed in attribution capabilities of online and offline
deterred a lot of people from offline.
Today, offline has gotten better at attribution and as positioning themselves as being able to do
attribution, but also online attribution has deteriorated.
So all of a sudden, that argument kind of slimmed out a little bit.
And I'm seeing offline get a lot more.
And podcasts especially are actually very, very performing for a lot of brands.
Yeah, those are a couple of things that come to mind.
Those are great.
Happy to hear the podcast piece.
Excellent.
And then I actually, I'm an investor in a startup that did a big at-a-home campaign.
And they just told me that it was like a 10 to 1 positive ROI on the deals that they got
out of it.
So I've been seeing that too.
And that's such a good point that the measurement and attribution online has come down where it maybe makes more sense to try stuff like that.
Amazing.
All right.
Are you ready for our very exciting lightning round?
I'm going to ask you five questions, I think.
And then just, yeah, let's go through a quick.
Let's do it.
Okay.
What are two or three books that you recommend most to other people?
That's something that I think is very wrong to recency bias.
right? It's like what are some of the books you've read recently that you've enjoyed? But I will say there are a couple of books that stuck with me over the years. I think on the business side, on the business side, productivity side, it's a book called Essentialism. I forget the author's name. I think his last thing is Macau and something. And it's basically the book about cutting out the noise and finding a singular focus and doing that really well. It's a book that I,
That was a game changer for me at Gramerly, being sort of new in my career,
having really aggressive goals, not being scared to say no, taking on a lot, just
Felix thinking like, well, I'm only working 12 hours a day.
There's 12 more left.
I can just, you know, like, I can do it.
And then when you end up stepping into a leadership role, which happened for me, I mean,
it happened prior to grounded, but really I was able to kind of grow into that role at Grounderly.
that book was incredible
and I used it a lot.
I pretty much got copies
for everybody on the team,
like 40 plus people.
And so that is a book,
I swear by.
I read a lot outside of like
work and business.
I don't know if it's appropriate,
but I'll say that
Victor Freakles,
a man's search for meaning
is just a remarkable memoir
on perseverance.
And I think that biggest takeaway is
you can't control
what's happening around you,
but you can control
your reaction to it.
And then I'd say a book that I read recently
because I was very, you know,
affected by the Russia
invasion of Ukraine. I'm originally
from Ukraine, I believe you are as well.
So it hit very close to home.
And there have been a lot of references
drawn between like President Zelensky
and his response in this war
and Winston Churchill's response
in 1941.
when, you know, Italy started marching through Europe.
And so I read a book called, I think, The Splendent and the Vial by Eric Clark.
Yeah, I read that.
Did you also read it since the invasion?
No, it was before that, but I totally get that now.
Reading it right now, because I've been following the conflict very closely,
but for people who haven't followed the conflict or maybe have only followed, you know, the war kind of in a cursory way,
you can put what's happening into historical context,
remarkably well.
So I feel like that book accomplishes two things.
Number one, it's like you learned something about not-so-distant history
that maybe you didn't know,
which was about Great Britain's and Winston Churchill's kind of courageous response
in the face of Hitler's invasion of Europe.
But you also can draw so many parallels to what's happening today.
And hopefully, hopefully, that helps us
understand what's at stake.
Not to end on too grandiose of a note.
We'll go less grandiose quickly, but I will add one thing that stood out in that book
that is also true in the Ukraine is how during the firebombing of Britain,
people are just like going out every day, going to clubs, still having,
I know, living their life.
And same thing.
Today is, and not just Kiev, but it's very life.
I love that.
Okay.
We'll move on to less.
Less serious stuff, maybe.
What a transition to you.
What's your favorite other podcast?
Honestly, there's only one other podcast that I listen to right now.
Because I've just been so consumed.
Like, I listen to a lot of like live streams and read a lot about the conflict,
which has taken me, which is taking up so much of my like headspace.
That's not work related.
But I would say the all in pond, it's, I feel like it's a cool way for me to just catch up
and everything that's going on through their unique filter.
That's probably the old.
Cool.
Yeah, I learn a lot.
I learn a lot from that one.
It's so much drama on that show.
Okay, great.
Favorite recent movie or TV show?
Anything stand out?
So that's another thing.
I've been like since February.
Right?
Like, I've watched like nothing.
Like my Netflix skew just keeps growing because they keep emailing me saying,
this new season is out.
I'm like, oh, yeah, I used to like that show.
Let me add it to the Q.
I mean, recently I had some downtime.
The kids were with grandma, so I watched them.
hustle with Adam Sandler.
Love that. So good.
Yeah, it was good. It's very light.
It's not like a movie that's going to make you think a lot, but it was like just good old
entertainment.
Yeah.
I like that.
I like that summary.
Yeah, so delightful.
Maybe one more question.
Who else in the industry do you most respect as a thought leader?
Maybe someone people may not know or if anyone else comes to mind.
Yeah.
That's a very good question.
So I would say, you know, first of all, I do believe that.
some of the brightest minds,
honestly, in any craft,
are people that you never hear.
Because, you know,
it takes a certain personality, energy,
and probably a lot of other circumstances, right,
to invest in your personal brand, right?
And also, it's very hard to do that
while still staying relevant as a practitioner.
I mean, if I think about myself two years ago,
before, you know, starting advising,
I was just kind of living in my grammarly cave.
And I felt like I was probably at the top of my craft,
but, you know, I didn't have time to pick my head up or,
or maybe not even not even just tie,
but I didn't know where to start to pick my head up
and do something like this.
I would say some people that I, I mean, I mentioned Ethan,
in terms of SEO,
SEO and just organic growth loops and, you know,
content as a growth engine.
he is, you know, best in class.
Who else?
Okay, so Mark Fisk, he shows up in the Reforge chats a lot.
He was leading growth and marketing at Credit Karma for a while.
And right now, he's an investor, I think, at the HRG Capital,
but he is a really, really strong thought leader on all things,
performance marketing attribution, you know, and just kind of paid acquisition at large.
those are two people that I make sure I, and there are others, of course,
but those are two who I make sure I stay in touch with at least have a quarterly basis
because any casual catch-up just yields so many weak nuggets.
Amazing.
Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out, learn more,
and how can listeners be useful to you?
Honestly, I don't have a very strong online presence.
I would say LinkedIn is probably the only place where I eat things for recent,
so folks can find me there.
They can also find me inside of Lenny's newsletter.
I do.
I do many good appearance there once in a while and on that's odd.
How can folks it be helpful to me?
Odyssey, promote the shit out of Lenny's newsletter and Lenny's Fod.
And, you know, if you're building awesome things, come talk to me.
I always carve out some amount of time in my life just, you know, for non-commercial things, right?
just to have conversations with founders and spent 30 minutes with them on a phone,
expecting nothing in return and maybe, you know, save them some time from making some of the
mistakes that I've made and help help direct them on a more awful path.
So, you know, it's kind of, it's about it.
Amazing.
Yuri, you are awesome.
Thank you so much for making the time to do this.
I learned a ton.
I can't wait to get this episode out.
There's just so much meat to this thing.
Dude, this was good.
I feel like my nervousness was unfounded.
This was super orgique.
you are just as welcoming as you are outside of the pod.
So yeah, thanks for having you.
Thanks, Siri.
Thank you so much for listening.
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