Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Inside TikTok: Culture, strategy, monetization, and more | Ray Cao (Global Head of Monetization Product Strategy and Operations)

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

Ray (Jiayi) Cao is the global head of product strategy and operations for monetization product at TikTok. Prior to TikTok, Ray spent six years at Google helping scale Google Shopping globally. In our conversation, we discuss:• TikTok’s internal culture and core values• How TikTok’s product team operates• How working at TikTok is different from working at Google• How TikTok rolls out to new markets• TikTok’s core principle of “context, not control”• How their sales and product teams work together• Lessons (and mistakes) from building TikTok’s early go-to-market team• The importance of hiring for quality rather than quantity• Insights on being successful on TikTok as a creator, a business, and an advertiser—Brought to you by:• WorkOS—The modern API for auth & user identity• Eppo—Run reliable, impactful experiments• OneSchema—Import CSV data 10x faster—Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-tiktok-culture-strategy-monetization—Where to find Ray Cao:• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jiayiraycao/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Ray’s background(04:55) Cultural differences between Google and TikTok(08:24) Fine-tuning the algorithm for different markets(12:15) Examples of fine-tuning the algorithm(15:11) Core principles and values of TikTok(19:34) Hiring at TikTok(21:38) Embracing the “always day one” mentality(25:09) Collaboration between teams(28:38) Amazon’s cultural influence(31:14) Setting up the product organization for speed and innovation(35:38) Building the go-to-market team(40:18) What makes people successful at TikTok(43:02) Thoughts on putting in long hours(44:40) OKRs and planning at TikTok(49:12) Tips for how to be successful on TikTok(53:49) Tips for advertising on TikTok(01:04:03) Getting started with TikTok Ads(01:08:42) Common mistakes to avoid with TikTok advertising(01:09:44) Ray’s favorite TikTok account(01:10:54) Where to find Ray—Referenced:• TikTok: https://tiktok.com/• Google Shopping: https://shopping.google.com/• Eugene Wei’s blog: https://www.eugenewei.com/• TikTok and the Sorting Hat: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorting-hat• How Netflix builds a culture of excellence | Elizabeth Stone (CTO): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-netflix-builds-a-culture-of-excellence-elizabeth-stone-cto/• Inside OpenAI | Logan Kilpatrick (head of developer relations): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/inside-openai-logan-kilpatrick-head-of-developer-relations/• Brian Chesky’s new playbook: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/brian-cheskys-new-playbook/• Lead with Context not Control: https://www.svpg.com/lead-with-context-not-control/• Shuba on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktokbrownchick• Duolingo on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@duolingo• Duolingo leagues: https://duolingo.fandom.com/wiki/League• CapCut: https://www.capcut.com/• Amanda Talijan (silent baby item reviews) on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@amanda_talijan/video/7321700482018233642—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [e-mail].—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. 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

We rarely get a peek into what it's like to work at TikTok. What are some core principles or values or just how TikTok operates? The number one thing is contacts no control. That's really why we're always encouraging people to sync themselves as a business owner. You give them all the information they need and then let them just do things without specific instructions. How do you actually solve the puzzle by connecting all the dots together? Just like how I see some of my friends, their kids playing Legos. If you don't really see the full picture, you won't be able to make the Lego as a one thing at the end of the day.

You have to see the other pieces. What else are important cultural values of TikTok, of how TikTok operates that everyone always has in mind when they're building? We always have this mentality. We are a startup. We are a young company. We always hungry for growth. In a very reactive way, is like, how can I run my second half of my marathon faster than the first half? Today, my guest is Ray Tiao.

Ray is the global head of monetization product strategy and operations at TikTok, where he's been for over four years. Prior to TikTok, Ray spent six years at Google, helping scale Google shopping globally. TikTok is interesting for two big reasons. One, it's one of the most successful businesses in history, last valued at over $80 billion, and its parent company is the most valuable private company in the world, last valued at over $200 billion. Two, TikTok is quickly becoming one of the biggest advertising platforms alongside Meta and Google, and generated nearly $10 billion in advertising revenue just a couple years. ago. So for both these reasons, TikTok is a really interesting business and team to learn from.

And I've seen very few podcasts and even media get a peek inside how TikTok operates. In our conversation, we discuss TikTok's culture, their core principles and values, how they hire, how they move so fast, their emphasis on working hard, how they do OKRs and planning. We also get into how to succeed on TikTok's ad network. Why you want to be testing at least 10 videos a week, how it's different from running ads on Instagram, how to make content that does well on TikTok, and so much more. This episode has a lot of interesting lessons and insights. Obviously, TikTok is at the center of a lot of debate globally. Some people love it, some people hate it.

But no matter your opinion of TikTok, there's a lot that we can learn from their success. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow the podcast on your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Ray Tiao after 8. short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point your customers will start asking for

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Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and Draft Kings rely on Epo to power their experiments. experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features. And Epo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I left most was our experimentation platform

where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Epo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying, prolonged analytics cycles. Epo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team,

sparking new ideas for the A-B testing flywheel. Epo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Epo at getepo.com.com slash Lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's get-eppo.com. com slash Lenny. Ray, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Lenny, for having me. It's a pleasure. It's my pleasure. I am really excited to have you here because it feels like we rarely get a peek into what it's like to work at TikTok, how TikTok built product and operates, also how to be successful on TikTok as a business, as an advertiser. So I have all these kinds of questions for you and so I'm really happy to be chatting. I want to just start with a little bit about your time before TikTok,

which was at Google and kind of comparing that to TikTok. So you're at Google for six years, I believe. Now you're at TikTok. I'm curious what stood out to you about the cultural differences between how Google operates and TikTok operates. Three major things, I would say. Number one is really how these two companies thinking about innovation. Right.

So I think Google has a very strong philosophy. of, you know, we're engineering that and there's a lot of technology driven and a lot of pieces they are not necessarily always trying to I'll say cope with the market even, right? However,

I think at the TikTok, I think besides the technology part, we do have a very keen, I'll say, appetite to really understand what the markets really want and also how can we really service our clients in a better way. And the clients here is not

necessarily only for an advertiser, including our user and also creator altogether. So that's one of the things I think it's very different in terms of TikTok way of work. It's very customer-centric in a way. And again, the customer here is not necessarily only for the business partner, but also for our regular user and creators on the platform. And the second one is really thinking about how we take approach on product development. right? So a lot of times that, you know, we take a very rigid approach in terms of product development. And oftentimes you see us that, you know, experimenting a lot of different things at all the same time. And also, we do have a lot of engineering and led a project in the backhand

to really understand how can we optimize better for the platform. So a lot of time, these are the things that I think TikTok is doing really, really well. The last piece I have to say is approach for global prioritization, right? A lot of times that you see a U.S.-born company go global, and oftentimes still, they are really rooted with the U.S. market. And there's nothing wrong with it, to be honest, because this is the biggest market for them. As a, I would say, far east-born company, I think a lot of times that we can take approach with truly how do we think about globalization.

And for example, we launched a lot of products not necessarily first in the North America. We launched in Southeast Asia, for example, for our shopping, really like very big initiative internally for shopping. And we launched our really like creator fund here in the North America. We launched our gaming approach, really like service our EU gaming advertisers, really, really strong over there. So there are a lot of different approach in terms of how do we engage. prioritize our go-to-market and also product development.

So that's the part I feel like, you know, we're very unique in the market or unique to some of the, that was a tech company born in the U.S. It reminds me there's this piece by this smart guy, Eugene Wei, who wrote a few things about TikTok over the years and just like why it's been so successful. And one of his really big point is that TikTok can work really well in other markets because it's basically, you don't need to know a ton about the market because it's this algorithm that figures out what people in each market want. Is there anything along those lines you've seen that just has been really fundamental to

it working so well in many different markets? The algorithm is definitely helping, right? It's because it is basically the machine is doing a lot of heavy lifting. That's actually, I think, across the board on a technology company today. The differences is actually how much you are willing to take the heavy lifting over there in the market. By that, I mean really like sending your troops into the market. hiring your local talent,

understanding the culture, and really understanding the behavior from those users. I understand, like, the machine can do things, but also at the same time that we need to actually get local talent to fine-tune the machine. So there were a lot of a conversation

about how, I would say, technology is able to change our life, but I do think that, at the end of the day, I do believe technology is a tool. So if we do have an ambition to go global, you have to do one more thing is actually take your step into global.

Rather than having the machine that heavy lifting, you have to really understand in local culture. I had a fun background for my first job is to really doing like a go-to-market research

in the Southeast Asia area. I think there was only one thing open my eyes after a year and a half in this career path is different market have totally different, I would say,

culture. And these market behaviors are actually coming out of this culture. One of the fun example I always been using was, I was doing market research for one of the suppliers, for Turner and also these ink cartridges, for Thailand as a go-to-market research.

One of the things is always concerned to my, at that point, the client was they cannot figure out why their premium product cannot sell in Thailand. And then we just figure out, like, you know, because the quality of their printing machine and also their ink cartridges are premium. And the quality of the paper and everything is very good. But when you actually do talk to those consumers in those market, the answer is very eye-opening. They literally told me at that time is I don't care.

I don't care if your ink cartridges or your printer is at the premium quality. Maybe the printer I can use, but I can use compatible ink cartridges or tuner for that. because my consumer won't care about your printing quality or the majority of my consumer won't care. So in that case, you should not necessarily worry about if you are a premium product. It's actually more about how long, how durable, how reliable, you're able to print things and people can read. So I think these are the insights I think a lot of times you will be neglected from some

of the clients or, you know, the manufacturers or even the owner of the business because they think that, you know, we want to serve this segmentation. However, this segmentation is that big in this area, right? So that's the reason I said, you know, the culture is really the key part from the market. If you don't understand the culture, you won't be able to understand the behavior over there. It's more about that, I think when we say about globalization or take the product go-to-market in a global scheme or even build a part. You have to get your hands dirty and to really understand local culture so that you can understand local behavior.

I love that advice. The way you described it, which I love also is that you kind of have to fine-tune the algorithm and the product to work in different cultures. Is there an example of how that was done with TikTok, like a tweak that had to be made or some kind of fine-tuning that happened for it to work in a different market? Yeah, I think we did a lot of fine-tuning on our user product side to really think about content. So that's the number one thing. It's going to be super different coming from each of the market and also from each of the culture.

For example, in Japan, how do you actually get more content that relevant for the culture? A lot of people may think, okay, are you guys doing dancing or doing singing for Japan? the answer is not. It is actually more food on the TikTok side. How do you actually introducing new food restaurant or new recipes? And also sometimes that you're introducing a new technology, I would say 3C product, like consumer electronics product over there. So these other content get really popular sometimes in Southeast Asia or even Japan area.

And versus in the U.S., as everybody knows that we're studying from really like lip-syncing at a very early stage. But now really, we're expanding to shopping behaviors and also a lot of people using us as a main platform to acquire a new discovery for the product. So these are the things I think, yeah, different market definitely deserves and demand different kind of treatment. And if you are able to do this a lot, you're able to find success over there. That's really interesting because you could think it's just this algorithm that figures

everything out for you, but I think what you're pointing out is you have to seed it with the right sorts of use cases that that culture is most excited about. Another good example will be creative, right? So it's a very good example how human can work with technology together. We have a ton of creatives and we have a ton of content, right? So of course, we use machine to label those content, use metadata to analyzing those content. However, a lot of times you can find that, you know, when we're really thinking about how creative can help advertisers, humans, actually make a more interesting or more, I'll say, influencing decisions over there. For some of the verticals, we can say that, oh, you know what?

Maybe you can try a coupon image with a new product, like a sticker on the top. This maybe actually works better compared to some of the price promotion even. So a lot of things really depends on how do you actually interpreting the numbers and interpreting the data points. But also at the same time, your business acune is going to be very important here to make a judgmental call for some of the situation like that. I think we still rely a lot on both machines and also our own experts to analyzing those trends and give it the recommendations. Awesome. Okay. So there's a few threads I'm going to fall later. You talked about the product development process. So I'm going to want to spend time there. Also about how to be successful in TikTok, both as a creator, also as a business. I'm excited to hear your advice there. But I want to spend a little more time first on just what it's like to work with.

than TikTok and the culture of TikTok. What are some core principles or values or just like how TikTok operates? If you had to identify, like, here's the ways that we all think about what we want to do, right? And the most important to your day-to-day work, what words and concepts come to mind? The number one thing reasoning really, really well with me is context, no control. Oftentimes, when we're looking around companies, different sizes, when you looking at

how to collaborate oftentimes we see the behavior that a lot of people just working on a smaller piece based off their job description

right so hey you're working on go to market and you're working on data analytics and you're working on this book of business

e-commerce and you're working on auto industry for example a lot of times that these human-made silos is actually

slow and sales right because humans are not, or our talent, they're not supposed to be categorized into different busket. They may have their own majority of responsibility for sure. But we don't want to cap them into this kind of a box we created. That's really why we're always encouraging people to sync out of the box and sink more and sync themselves as a business owner rather than a piece of machine,

like keep the machine running. Oftentimes that we say, context is no control. That means you actually can go above and beyond to really think about your whole business problem as your own problem. And your piece is maybe one part of it to solve the puzzle. But how do you actually solve the puzzle by connecting all the dots to get? We're encouraging all the people to think alike that way. And by that, I think we kind of mentally break out those walls.

So encouraging our team members to do a little bit more thinking. It's very important. It's a little bit more thinking because the think part. is very important, right? And then now, in terms of getting things into behavior or changes or get into action, then you need to really collaborate it with other teams because we don't want to necessarily creating, you know, hey, you're on other people's working group now. You're actually stepping on other people's toes now.

It is not the situation we're trying to encourage it. But we're encouraging more is context and no control. Think more about how you can change. And then when you do really actually take some actions, be active. you reach out to who is who's supposed to be the owner of that and then have a discussion right so then you can able to really like you're able to connect in the thoughts all together so that's one thing I think it's very unique to our culture I think it's very very important for us to continue grow at this speed because everybody have a I'll say full visibility towards or full ownership to their

mindset how they can contribute and the key there is context implying you give them all the information they need and then let them just do things without giving them specific instructions, hey, I need you to hit this goal, work on this project, launch this thing. Here's what we know. Do the things you think are best roughly. I know it's not just like anyone does anything. But I imagine that's kind of the implication there. Yeah, I think it's context, no control, plus proactive thinking and reactive doing.

Right. So you have to do more proactive thinking with these contexts. Now, reactive doing means that you need to collaborate. But when everybody has this kind of mindset, the collaboration should be very smooth because people have the contacts altogether. I think the part that I see other, maybe some of the other company facing challenges is actually there's too many IOs in between. And you have people that are just protecting their own thing and working their own thing

and then I'm delivering. But just like how I see some of my friends, their kids playing Legos, if we don't really see the full picture, you won't be able to make the Lego as a one-third. at the end of the day. You have to see the other pieces. So I think that's the part. I think it's really powerful and reasoning really, really well when we're really thinking about product development and also product go to market. So it's a pretty full cycle. People have to see this, and then they have the context. I love this. And this has come up actually a few times recently when I was talking to the CTO of Netflix and also Open AI. They're very similar in culture

where it's give people a lot of autonomy and freedom and not a lot of do this, do this to this. The key there is to hire very high quality people and very high caliber people because if not, then things won't work out too great. Is there anything along those lines that you can share? Just like, yeah, the kinds of people you end up hiring and how you hire people that can work well in that environment.

I agree with you, right? So the caliber of these people is actually pretty important to support the structure I just talked. talked about. And oftentimes I can see some people that with the quality of, you know, always curious. Curiosity is a very important quality when I'm actually talking to my interviewers, because I want to see that they are naturally curious to new things. They want to learn more about the new things and don't really get stuck with their own things. That's one thing. And the other thing is the discipline, because like I said, it is actually a double sword

a double-edged sword in this case. Right. So it could potentially introducing some of the chaotic situation in a company because everybody is thinking everything. The discipline here is actually how you are really following the guidance

on reactive doing, be always thinking about how to collaborate. And the discipline here and also the rigorous approach here is also going to be very important. One of the good example of that is the ability to prioritize because I don't believe one thing is everybody can do everything

you have to do a prioritize properly so that you're able to push the right agenda. So I think that's more of a kind of the quality of the people we're looking for is it is hard. Don't get me wrong. It is really hard to say that we can find everyone like that. But we would love to believe that we can train our employees like that so that they're able to even do better in their longer term career. Essentially, what you look for when you're hiring people is making sure they're always curious. they have high discipline and that they prioritize well. Coming back to the cultural pieces of TikTok,

so the main one you've shared so far as this idea of context, not control, what else are important cultural values of TikTok, of how TikTok operates that everyone always has in mind when they're building and meetings, making decisions? Yeah, another internal thing that we always say is always day one. We want to make sure that, you know, we always have this mentality. We are a startup. We are a young company.

We always hunger for growth. We don't want to fall into the trap that, you know, people may think, oh, you guys are very successful in the market. And then you are not necessarily, you know, need to worry about your existence anymore. I think it is actually something we're trying to avoid. We always want to make sure that in our team members always think like, okay, if this is actually a new day for you, I know what other things that you always want to keep in your mind you want to do. And also to keep that spirit is very important.

a lot of times that I can see some of the mature company, they're not necessarily losing the edge of, I would say, this competition or losing the edge of being innovative. I think it's more about, like, you know, some of the culture has been shifted because you have a lot of new employees that are living in your culture. So not necessarily, it's not going to be like the old days

that the co-founder is sitting in a mountain of you. But I do think this company has a very interesting behavior I see there is, I can talk to anyone at any time via our internal communication system. I can ping show right now. I can ping the co-founder if I want to tomorrow. We always keep this kind of mentality internal, is that we're still a young company. We want to grow, and you can feel free to talk to anyone.

We don't have a limitation for that. As long as you have a good opinion, I would love to hear from you. Is that creating some of the, I would say, you know, chaotic situation? It might be. but I do think that this keeps the company very energetic. People are willing to share, people are willing to engage. That's very important. I want to add you one more thing we just talked about,

you asked me what is actually the uniqueness of TikTok versus the other company. It's very tied up to that is, I have never seen a company, the engineering team, and the product team, and the sales team are so close. That's definitely one of the aha moment I had, because if you're thinking about if your engineer does not really know

what the market wants and if your PM doesn't really know what is actually the client's feedback they won't be able to get a right product in the market. They just won't be. And they won't even tell a good go-to-market story to advertisers or even to our users because they just don't know

what are the end users of thinking. So I think it's a very secret source for us is that our sellers and our engineering team and our product team and also data scientist team. We're all collaborating really, really closely. And that's very much a, I would say, a such big advantage for us compared to, you know, when a company becomes too big and nobody talks to each other. So I do hope that it is the thing that we're going to continue reinforce along the years where we continue to grow the company.

What does that actually look like? I imagine people hearing this are like, yeah, we're going to make sales and product and Eng very close. I imagine many people don't actually do this too well. How do you actually execute that? Is it they report to the same leader? They sit next to each other or, I don't know, Zoom next to each other. What actually makes that work?

Yeah, I think a couple of things. Number one is a like a structure, right? Everything has to go out of the structure. So we do have a meeting structure that we call it like used to be by, by month. and now it's actually a quarterly level, we get everybody together. Engineering leader, product leader, and also not necessarily only the leader level.

Some of the team members, we're joining the force together to have a big meeting. That meeting is 180 people-ish. It's crazy to have a meeting at that size, especially that, you know, there are different kind of functionality there. But one thing we keep it really well is actually we are using a reading format of meeting.

So it's a doc reading. We just read and comments and understand the context. Again, it is the talk, bring everybody together. And then we discuss the things that we want to make a decision with. Or the things that we feel is a blocker or things that we need to celebrate. So that meeting structure keep everybody together and consensus. Again, not necessarily only for the top leaders, right? It's normal for the engineering leader and private leader and self-leader

at the company level, they talk to each other. But we made that happen for their core team members. And the very beginning of my time here, that was literally getting to the IC level. So it is pretty eye-opening for me to join the meeting first time because I was, get so used to their level of different meetings at Google. But here is like, okay, everybody read one documentation. And then you just understand what are people talking about or thinking about.

It is intentional. But I do think that that structure is a very important. very big secret sauce, I would say. Not necessarily we invented it, right? We also learned from the other companies, right? So it is actually one of the things that we, as it, deployed pretty well today here to keep that structure running. And the other thing is really feed those, I'll say, market, first-hand market information to our PMs and RDs. That means we took them out with us. We're just inviting them together to join the force together to meet the clients. And a lot of the company, if you want to meet APMs, if you want to meet the engineering leaders,

it's literally like once a year maybe. And also if you're investing a ton with some of the platforms, for us, I think it's always on. To junior PMs, senior PMs, and engineering leaders, we invited them together to this immersion trip we recorded to really get FaceTime with our clients, to really feel the heat they are actually really facing the challenge by using our own product. So that kind of, I would say, the aha moment is bringing a lot of, I would say, insights to them and also get them to feel the heat of the panes, the sellers may feel. So that worked really well too. I think oftentimes is a battle, right?

It is not necessarily the general. You have to stay in the back. You sometimes have to go to the front. But we just make sure that the general go to the front quite often in our company to do that. I love that concept of having them feel the heat. An interesting trend I've noticed is there's a lot of Amazon influence on the way you all operate. There's always day one idea. There's the memo culture you just described.

Any idea where that comes from is they're like a senior Amazon person that came in and helped influence those sorts of things? Is it just, hey, Amazon's killing in there. I've noticed interestingly, Amazon has influenced the most companies in all of their ways of working. So it's not a surprise. I'm just curious if there's anything else though that's interesting. I think we have the we have the benefits to standing on the shoulder of all the giants, right? So we learn definitely always there once the culture that, you know, Amazon was always championing. I think we we learn from them, right? So this is something that we, I would say, like, you know, always trying to listen and trying to learn from the industry. The dark fashion is also

learn from Amazon. Right. So we kind of studied, oh, this is maybe one of the best practices. we can employ it here or deploy it here. So we tried it. Not even mentioned, we have the OCR system. So it is actually a very good learning from our early stage from Google. So all these, I think, definitely we do have some of the, I would say, benefits being the newcomer to the market and then learn a lot of the best practices coming from our industry peers and really like deployed here, hopefully successfully.

And some of the things that we just tweak it, right? So for example, our culture, always day one, is definitely very similar to, Amazon, but the implementation of that could be different. And also the content's no control pieces. I believe other companies may have the similar idea, but for us, I think we just really need to implement it in a way that's going to be fitting to us. I happen to listen to your podcast with the Airbnb co-founder the other day. He also mentioned that, you know, how he break out the IOs. I think it is very similar approach among the industry right now, trying to really make sure the team is able to talk to each other because I think a quote from him,

Like if your PM doesn't know how to sell the product they're creating, you won't be able to do your job better. So this is literally how we're thinking about it too in a lot of ways. I know that you all move very fast and I want to actually talk about that next. And with that, it feels like your value should be, it's always the first half of the day instead of it's always day one. It's always the first, it's the morning of the first day. I think the value, if I put it in a very reactive way,

is like how can I run my second half of my marathon faster than the first half. So that's how I think about it and how do we really like continue pushing for it. Wow, that sounds very hard and painful, but I like that metaphor. Okay, so let's talk about how you set up the product org to move as fast as you move. I think there's this idea of just like running fast. I don't know if that's a phrase you use, but just how is the product org set up, especially different from other teams that you've seen that allows it to move as quickly as you move and innovate as often as you all innovate? Our product teams are setting, I would say, very importantly, is global. Right. So we want to actually, like I said, the number one step is if we really want to do global business, you have to go

global. So we set up teams really across the board in the global locations to really acquire global talent, who knows the market and who knows the competition too. Right. So we're able to really getting the jumpstart in the local market. So, for example, we have the majority of the engineer and also PMs currently located in the west coast of the North America. So Los Angeles and also San Jose, these are the key hubs we have for our tech folks. And also for North America-wise, we do have our majority of the go-to-market leads sitting in the New York to get closer with our seller and also with our clients at the same time.

Also, it is not necessary only for North America. Like I said, we're heavily invested in Southeast Asia. So you can see that a lot of our engineering and also PM resources are deployed over there in Singapore to enable them to get closer to our clients over there as well. So really, like, deploy your resources globally and also focusing on the key markets you want to penetrate. That's the commitment. I think we're doing pretty pretty good in this case. And the second one is to really, again, I think the PMs and the product team of settings are oftentimes, I'll say like, because we're growing so fast, oftentimes we have to do a lot of minor team adjustment to catering for that.

So it is very usual or common for teams to do a little bit work on an annual basis or even like on a two years or three year cycle. The stability is important. Don't get me wrong, but I do think that as a faster growing company, we need to consistently to reiterate, not only the product, but also our teams. So how can we do reiteration on the PM side, on the go-to-market side? It is actually something that, you know, I have seen this company doing really, really well. Not necessarily we're bonding to one team structure. We're actually bound into the market need. And we're bounding to the growth we're looking for.

So we're not afraid to break out things. And actually I literally break out my team last year to make sure that my team having more go-to-market mindset to actually embedded them with seller directly. So these are the things that, you know, very, I would say, in-comventional to a size of this company, right? But I do think that's necessary and also that's a good mentality for the team to really run faster

with this kind of a rigid approach. So yeah, these are the two things, I think, very unique to us. I think it could also be continuously helping us in the next phase of the growth. Today's episode is brought to you by One Schema, the embeddable CSV importer for SaaS. Customers always seem to want to give you their data in the messiest possible CSV file. And building a spreadsheet importer becomes a never-ending sync for your engineering and support resources. You keep adding features to your spreadsheet importer, but customers keep running into CSUs. Six months later, you're fixing yet another date conversion edge case bug.

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letty. I know you mentioned earlier when we were chatting offline is when you were trying to build the go-to-market org for this stuff, you failed in some ways. And there's some things you learned from that experience. What went wrong when you first tried to approach this? Yeah, when I joined a company, there were only two people on the go-to-market side. For the advertising business. Yeah, there were only two people. And by that time, the U.S. and plus, I was a Europe business together, we're having like a less than 80 people. But the business is to grow and we need to hire really fast.

The first mistake I made was, by the way, the goal is to hiring 100 people in the six month to support the goal. to market. That's the speed we're into, right? So that is early 2020 to mid of 2020. So within six months, I need to hire, I will say, 100 people to supporting the global go-to-market structure and build everything. Then the first mistake I made just right that at the right point because we're trying to grow too fast. And sometimes as a hiring manager, I have to compromise the standard we're trying to hire. So that's the mistakes I think I made first

and I think nobody should be that mistake is you need always run for the quality rather than the quantity. So it's an easy mistake you can fall into the trap because the business demand you to go faster. If you don't have the main power, you won't be able to. But I also believe me, when I say this, this is a pain, right?

when you have the wrong people on the team, it's not necessarily going to make you move faster. It's going to actually slow you down. So that's one of the biggest mistakes I made for my first year when I created the team. And not necessarily myself only, right? So also my reporting manager, sorry, the manager is reporting to me,

they're facing the same pressure. And then it's casting down. So it's definitely the mistakes we made at early stage. The second thing I can think about is really on the context, no control. It is not necessarily I'm born into, to be honest, because I was trained really like, you know, hey, this is your box, finish your work here, and then you're good.

But the reason why I value that really like the attitude more today is literally I failed at the very early stage of my time here because I was trying to creating that kind of a very black and wide discipline for my team. You can do this, you cannot do that. But technically speaking, that's literally slowing things down. Because a lot of times you can see that, hey, we're delivering our go-to-market strategy, and we're good.

But literally, what you don't know is your goal is not to deliver the go-to-market strategy. Your goal is to land your go-to-market strategy with sells together. So if your job only is delivering, no, you're failed oftentimes because you're not really getting the market context. You're not even talking to your clients. So that was literally another mistake, I think, taught me how to really like embrace the culture here is context, no control. Right. And the third piece, I think it's also a mistake.

So really like a big aha moment for me as well is for the past couple of years. Now I've been managing a such big global organization. Oftentimes, even not myself, my managers, they don't have time to go detail and to go talk to the client. which is very scary because if you don't know, again, you don't hear what is happening in the market. You won't know the details in the market. You won't be able to take the right movement or take the right approach to go to market

or even give the feedback to the engineering team. So it's very important that, you know, the leader at any level needs to be situational. You cannot always down to the weed and you cannot really distance yourself from the reality. So you need to find out of the violence to really get engaged and also through yourself out there to getting, I was like getting deeper into the problems,

to identify the problems. And then you were able to perform even better because I don't believe one thing is you're the pure, I was the people manager. You cannot do that because when you do that, you're very, at the very, I would say, like a position to really thinking about your career because you're losing your competitive edge from the other, I would say, you know, equivalence, talents in the market.

I love these stories. I love stories of things not working out. So I appreciate you sharing these things. When someone doesn't work out at TikTok and they have a bad time and they get let go or they leave, what's the most common reason? Like other than just they're not good enough? Is there like something that just doesn't stick with people that often leads to like this is not the place for me?

Yeah. I would try to really think about this in a different way. I can tell how people can be more successful here. So I definitely can see, like we just talked about, people are being very curious and people are very being, like, you know, nimble. They can be more successful here. At the same time, I think we have to admit to one thing. Join a startup and joining a rocket ship is a lifestyle.

It is not necessarily a job. You're working on from 9 to 5, right? So it is a different lifestyle. and it's not beautiful everyone. So if you are not able to adjust your mentality towards some of the work that we are here to do, and it's maybe not right fit for you. I'm not saying that candidates is incapable.

I think they could be capable in the other scenario for sure, but it's the right fit. I think that is a, I would say, very much towards the situation or the company status in the market. I can see a lot of people that, you know, they left and become very successful too. So it is not necessarily that, you know,

oh, we think you're not good and then you're going to be, you know, not good for every single other company. That's not the case. And one thing, and also this is my team culture I try to create it is, I'm happy to say that when an employee reach out to me,

say, hey, Ray, I'm actually leaving a company. As long as they're telling me that they're going to a better place or a place that they can continue to grow their career, I'm happy for them. Because oftentimes my last question during my interview is what is actually your goal in the next three to five years? And also like, you know, I'd be really honest with them, say, hey, I don't think this is the job for you forever, right? Nobody's going to work in this forever. If you can, great. But what is really like, you know, your no start? I think

that's the part that I would love to co-partner with you because I always believe one thing is it is not only about achieving the company goal, it's also achieving your really career goal or your employee's career goal together. So I want to creating that culture here as well. So yeah, I think I'm doing so far so good. Most of my team members, when they actually are moving on internally or externally, I'm able to say that, okay, that's a good choice. If I will you, I may probably do the same thing. It is actually a very good culture. I think I would love to champion across. On that first point, I'm also a huge advocate of just you will be successful if you work very hard. I know there's a bit of a backlash at working along and thinking too much about work-life balance.

And I feel like it's actually really important to work a lot and work long hours often to be successful. Specialty a company that's going through this because that's not going to last forever. I think it's a personal choice, right? It's a very much like a personal choice. If you are excited about this, if you want to grow together, yeah, this maybe is a good, thing for you and also depends on the life stage. So some of the people they want to actually get in more family time, I think that's also the right choice too.

But it just depends on your personal, I'll say, eliminate your personal choice rather than if the company demands that, I mean, I cannot force my team to working long hours. I don't want them to like working long hours. I think it's more about like if you're able to deliver, right? If it requires a bit longer time to contribute, I think it's okay. But you will also get rewarded very well too. So what's getting and what's get out. So I think it's, again, I do believe that this is the quality and also the value.

We're evaluating here as well. And even though it's hard in the moment, I find that those are the times you remember most and most fondly in your career. When you just go all in, I'm going to work really hard and do the best possible job I can do. assuming that doesn't last forever, those end up being the most impactful, helpful to your career, most proud moments when you're just like, look what I had accomplished.

And so I'm on the same page. I want to talk about being successful on TikTok as a creator, as a business, as an advertiser, but a couple more questions real quick on how TikTok operate. You mentioned you do OKRs,

just briefly. Is there anything that you've learned about being successful doing OKRs within TikTok? Maybe is there anything different that you all do versus how other companies think about OKRs? It is definitely a company alignment that we are using OKR as our basically the system to make sure that everybody is working towards the same goal. Implementing-wise, I think definitely we have a lot of room to improve, right?

So how often do you actually see your team able to go the OKR at the end of a quarter and also putting the OKR really two weeks or one week before to begin of a quarter? I have to say that, you know, shame on me. I sometimes, you know, delayed a little bit. But I think the goal is always there to using OKR system as our No Star to drive the behavior and also to align. Again, it's very important to align on the OKRs because I can see a lot of times the OKRs are putting in, but they are very siloed. And that is not really necessarily helpful for the company wanting to achieve in really high growth. So I think it's very important that we don't take OKR as a shell, but we take OKR as its core is cross-function alignment, cross-function goal settle.

So these are the things that we're still continuing improving. Is the way that OKRs work at TikTok, is there an OKR per team and they all kind of trickle up to a company-level OKR? Is it less structure that way? And teams kind of decide if they want to use OKRs or not. How does that roughly work? The structure is basically the guidance is you're using the key result to evaluating and then you put the steps in between. So that's how, at least my team has. been using this, I think the things that we can improve is the input and output.

So the output is very clear, but what is actually the input? Sometimes it's debatable, sometimes I have to say. And also, oftentimes your output is other people's input. Are you able to connect the dots over there too? Then that's actually the part that requires a lot of, I would say, reinforcement on alignment. Definitely we're getting better. Don't get me wrong. We're totally not perfect for sure.

but I do see there was a lot of of the momentum to leveraging this system better. If you know other companies doing this really, really good, please shoot in my way. I would love to learn from them. One last question here. You do planning. You have OKRs. Just briefly, how often do you all do

planning? Is there a yearly plan that you put together and then a quarterly detail plan? Yeah, we do have an annual planning cycle. But I have to say that, you know, our annual planning cycle is the baseline. We often do a lot of our iterations in the middle of the year. And also on a quarterly basis that, you know, we're able to pivoting really

nimboli to really catering to the things that we see in the market. Some of the longer term strategy won't change, just like the platform we want to always creating, you know, inspiring and also frictionless and immersive experiences for users. This won't change. But anything into the core of like how do we realize that, you're always a consistent experiment over there. I cannot speak for the user product side, but at least from an advertising product side that this is always the rigorous approach we're taking. And for the go-to-market part, that's also creating a very different behavior for us, right? Because oftentimes if we have a solid and kind of a static product roadmap,

you can do go-to-market relatively easy, I will say, because everything is planned. But with a environment like that, that basically make the go-to-market and also the product feedback loop much more shorter and faster. So there was a lot of, I would say, pressure or actually put it in nicely, there was a lot of innovative things that, you know, on the go-to-market side and also on the sales side, the company or the teams need to actually do to make sure that we're able to catering for that. But again, this is a teamwork rather than only one side of the work.

So far so good, I would say a lot of things that we've been able to achieve within the past couple years has been already proven that, you know, this approach has been working for us. But not necessarily they are always like, you know, it's perfect already. Always room to improve to make sure that, you know, we have more structural approach as well so that the market able to keep the pacing with us. We don't want to overwhelm our advertisers or our users either. So that's also the other part that, you know, we need to continue optimizing too. Okay. Let's talk about a different topic, which is being successful on TikTok. So the way I think about in my head is there's how to be successful as just a regular human creator person.

how to be successful as a business trying to just create viral content and then being successful as an advertiser, which I know is where you spend a lot of time. So let me just ask, is there a tip you could share for someone to be successful, say, aka go viral on TikTok? I imagine your answer will be just produce something people love

and want to share and like, but I guess is there anything that could be tactically useful when you're creating content in TikTok to help you go viral? I think if I know that, I definitely will already become a very successful creator, I have to say. Our system is very much smarter than I am. I cannot trick the system. But I have seen a couple of good cases, right? So number one thing is that you have to really like

be unfiltered. I mean, you don't really need to be perfect on this platform. I mean, that's the beauty of it. You can be yourself and you can really share the things that you like. And if you really master at one thing that you're really, really good at and you want to showcase, this is the platform for you to shine. Because not necessarily that, you know, we are fully saturated, right? And also our algorithm distributing the content in a very different way, right? Some other other platforms, they are, I would say, like a people-based, or friendship, a friend-based.

I think for us, it's purely based on actually you're creating something that, you know, everybody want to see. So let's see if we can distribute it more, right? So I think continuously to bring new content to this platform and testing and finding your own competitive edge going to be very important as a successful creator. And most of our creator has been doing that. And I can see some of our biggest TikTok stars. They're literally practicing this every single day. And I do think that creativity and that part of, I would say, getting the nuances is the key part to be more successful on the TikTok community.

And the second thing is it's including also for brands as well because I consider brands as our creator as well. They really need to embrace the culture and the community here. So really listen and understand what are the user behaviors on the platform

to understand what do they like to see. And also the messages or the presence could be very different from your other media channels or as a creator you could be very different from your other I would say platforms. So that's the other thing that, you know, it's going to be challenging because for them to shifting the mindset,

but I do think that, you know, definitely worse trial, right? So some of the, I would say, our early adopters has already been proven that when you do embrace the culture here, you're able to acquire a ton of different kind of user or, you know, the audience to your channel. And you can show a different side of yourself as well. So, yeah, I've been trying to do that. I have not really like finding my competitive edge, I have to say, but I'll keep trying. Is there an example? You could share if someone that has done that really well, either be really authentic and also embrace the community of a business specifically

that has done this really well and has taken off, not as an advertiser. There was a one creator I remember called Shaba. She's a singer. And she is able to call my eyes because she was able to basically wrap and also doing some of the songs cover in a very different way because she's a minority and she was able to basically using her minority identity as actually, hey, everybody was thinking I'm supposed to be doing like Bollywood music but actually you know what? I'm not. I'm doing a lot of very like, you know,

just hip-hop and also the music that, you know, people may think like I'm not good at. So it is pretty fun to watch that kind of a comparison or the contrast between a creator And also she's able to put a lot of original music on the platform to really inspire more people to do the same thing. There was another music, I would say, TikTok creator. So he was pretty big on the other platforms, but the total approach from him is he's basically changing the lyrics, make it very relatable as a personal life.

Because for example, he can totally change the lyrics from an old Bastry boy song or Un Sync song to make it like related with his daily communication with his wife. making it really relatable and fun. So these are the things I think is very unique to us. Like if you are able to test and find something like new like that, you're able to find a new batch of audience and even go viral on the platform. Okay, so then switching to the advertising network.

A lot of listeners here are thinking about, I imagine, advertising on TikTok. There's kind of classically been Facebook and Google are the two places to do run paid ads. paid ads are a huge growth driver for tons of companies. It's one of the easiest, you could say, or one of the most traditional way to grow. TikTok obviously is emerging and has already emerged as one of the newer advertising networks. So there's a lot of people thinking about how do I succeed as an advertiser on TikTok. So what advice do you have for people?

One, who is it best for? I imagine TikTok isn't the best place to advertise for every sort of business. So what sort of businesses are best aligned to be successful on TikTok? And then just what advice can you share to do well as an advertiser on TikTok? Yeah, I see a lot of a really different type of advertisers. I already find their success on the platform. One thing that they actually can do that is really due to a couple of things that they're doing. Number one is, like I said, they're embracing this platform.

They actually do a lot of things is TikTok first. I have a couple of advertisers they have actually creating their own internal, creative team just dedicated it for TikTok. So they actually produce a ton of creative every single day to actually test and learn to understand the platform and understand the community they're engaging with. So I was leaning in is the first part. It's harder, but it is not that hard.

As long as you try it, you will feel that every single day is getting easier. And also we make a lot of tools to make things easier for them as well. Like creative, we have also a lot of resources, on the platform, the creative hub, and also we have creative analytics help you. So these are the things that, you know, we're able to basically help the advertiser to leaning in more.

The other angle to leaning in more is test and learn. A lot of times that people don't know how to really run ads on this platform, right? Google is very much search, like search fronts. Like they are really leading on the intent graph. And meta is really on the people graph. they're making. I mean, TikTok is the content graph.

It's very different, I would say, machine compared to the other two. And it requires different way to optimizing and to leveraging the tools we have. So if you're applying the same logic from meta or Google into TikTok, not necessarily you are able to see great success, I have to say. So you have to really like get to the detail and to learn how do you operate. this platform at the very beginning. Of course, like I said, we're trying to make things as simple as possible because we strongly believe that a advertiser's job is to taking care of their own business,

and our job is to service them. So we definitely make things a bit easier and along the way. But still, it's a little bit learning for advertisers to change their mindset when they engage with us at the first time. And I can see that, again, for example, last Q4, I can see a lot of advertisers taking this approach, to really listen to us and understanding what is our best practices, they actually see a very successful Q4 on the platform.

So I do think that if you want to do more, just do more tests and learn with us and to really understand the impact from TikTok. Just to understand this point about versus Instagram because I think a lot of people probably run on them on both platforms and try to see which one's working better. Your point is the same content won't work as well on one versus the other. So just so people understand what the main difference there is,

I know you talk about there's the friend graph versus TikTok just spreads it all over and anyone can see it, you know, be friends. And it's really good at getting content out. So what is it that you would do differently if you're making a ad video for Instagram versus TikTok? I think the TikTok video, it's more about the backend settings, right? So how often do you actually changing creatives? I think for us, it is actually pretty rigid. You want to actually test more creatives on this platform and see which one is actually, working. And then we also have really detailed guidance on how do you set up your campaign structure

to make sure that you're able to be more successful on the platform. So these are the basic hygings we talked about. You can see those guidance are very different from what matter has today or even Google has today because we're just basically different platforms. And oftentimes you can also hear that we requires a bit more real-time react on the platform due to some of the trends we have seen. So that is the part I feel like if advertiser wants to engage more with our really the sales team and they're able to provide more guidance to you, and you're able to see more success there. But a lot of things will be counterintuitive, I would say, because the intuitive you have learned is coming from the other platforms, but technically we are not. Right. So a lot of things

that, oh, this doesn't make sense to me. But why don't you try it? And we make actually that really easy because we're showing a lot of, I'll say, out of credit to incentivizing our advertisements to try it. And in a day that hopefully they can see the result is proven itself. Got it. I think that's such an interesting point, this idea of testing more, which basically you're saying with Instagram, certain people will see it and they're not, and they're not just going to be, that's not going to be shown to tons of random people.

So you basically have one shot at getting this in front of the Instagram crowd versus TikTok just tries it, this explore and exploit kind of approach is like, we'll just keep trying stuff until something sticks. Yeah, I think it's actually like that. 100%. I think a lot of times that I think advertising, especially when digital advertising becomes a thing, right? So we kind of think everything can be calculated because you have the data.

But the beauty of advertising is never like that. The core value of advertising is to tell people don't know you exist. and tell them what you're doing for them and then creating this demand. Discovery is the core of advertising to me because I would never expect my wife telling me that was she going to buy when she walked into a shopping mall. If I know that, I will stop her already.

She oftentimes that, you know, get out something different, right? So this is not planned. I think that's literally one of the behavior I would love to emphasize more is you want to be opened up your door to more consumer. Because we are a digital version of word of mouth. I always compare us to that because it is the way that, how the digital era becomes more human.

Because it is actually helping a user to discover new things, just like what they used to do. There was a new place in a certain area you just go explore. It is just like that. So I think that's the reason why I think at the very beginning continue doing this kind of open-minded testing with us will be a very good approach to get some early learning and eventually that you can refine your approach.

But at the beginning, I would highly recommend that just be opened up and also take some risks with us together and we're able to show you, you know, how much we can actually benefit in the business. Awesome. And on that point, that was the other piece of advice you shared is pay attention to the trends so that you can connect your ad to things that people already laughing at or finding really interesting.

I feel like Duolingo is incredible at this. Their videos are hilarious. And I think they're all just organic videos and a lot of them connect the trends that are... Yeah. It's funny you brought up Duolingo because I'm actually now become a heavy user of Dealingro myself because...

Me too. I found... I watched a video on the TikTok. I think just basically like kids like just randomly learn a different language and make a lot of mistakes. And it's really funny. And then I just downloaded that app because I didn't know.

I've been using Dealingro for the past 40 days as a new year resolution. I'm committing myself to learn Japanese. Wow. 40-day streak? Yeah. Amazing. I'm at 25 days. Okay, great.

We're on par, pretty much. Are you in the Ruby League or Emerald League? Which league are you in right now? Emerald, okay, I think I'm in Emerald too. So see, we're on part, yeah. Just to close the thread on this, so you're talking about one of the benefits of TikTok ads is awareness building, basically more top of funnel. I know you also focus a lot on taking action, not just brand awareness.

There's also a lot of, so maybe talk a bit about that, just like that's also a big part of advertising on TikTok. Yeah, I think the beauty of word of mouth is actually, you know that what a mouse leads to actions, right? So I think TikTok, we oftentimes, people are thinking that, oh, TikTok is really good for building awareness, building upper funnel, or some of the discovery funnel. But I really want to say that we want to prove, and also we already proved the studies we have seen from third parties that we're driving actions at the same time. And this is literally the ambition we're trying to really like talk to our advertisers, especially on the commerce front that, you know, shopping and TikTok shop and shop ads.

It is actually the proven points that we see. And also this is not necessarily coming off of our illusion, right? because we see there was the biggest trend on TikTok is TikTok made me buy it. We have billion-level views on that. It's continued growing. And this literally inspired us to do this product. Like I said, you know,

one of the very important things here is we drive our product by listening to our user and see the behavior from them. And we see the behavior, and now we're trying to capture that and provide the best service to our user and also help advertisers to really shipping their product. So I do think that, you know,

this year, people will see us more as a full funnel solution platform rather than only, you know, building the brands. Because we want to actually impacting on full funnel for our advertiser. Again, driving their business result is more important to us. Say a startup is starting to think about advertising on TikTok. Maybe they've done some Google ads and Facebook ads. What do you recommend they plan for in order to just see if this could work for them? Like how much time should they give it? How many ads should they run? How much budget? should they have a lot to just explore this as a growth channel for them? I would say at the very beginning,

the investment will be coming from their leaning into creating a business account with us. So this is actually how you're engaging with your community. But even before that, I think just do some research on a platform and be the user as a TikTok to really experiencing it and see the differences. And then you're thinking about how can you actually connecting your behavior or your desire behavior coming from a user with your business. And then you're creating content around it.

And that's the moment, I think, this first step is creating your business presence on the TikTok. And the idea there is just an organic account you create, let's say, Lenny's podcast, which I actually have my Lenny's podcast is on TikTok. So we can use that as an example maybe. So you're saying start off just creating free business account on TikTok and posting videos just to see how it feels and how it goes. Yeah. Just see how it feels. So maybe some of the videos you don't get any views and some of the views you get more views.

And then in the day, you can test some of the advertising products drive those awareness and see if it's actually driving impact for you. And then you have to do more maybe like testing with us or AB testing or geo-spitting testing eventually. It depends on how big the investment is. You can see there is actually a directional impact of your business. And also, we are giving you reporting and insights on how you're doing. doing on the platform. So you can optimize it towards that. But obviously, the very important part is trying to get a feeling of the platform by creating your organic presence and then try to launch

the ads account to make sure that you're able to drive more traffic to your desire destination or to a desire actions that you want a user to take and continue refining that. Along the way, there are a lot of things that you're going to learn. For example, how can you leverage in the automation solutions on the platform and how can leveraging some of the, I'll say, creator trends you detect it on the platform. And also some of the tools that we're creating to help you to generating those script. So these are all the things that you can learn from the platform. In terms of time investment, I think at the beginning of the month, definitely it's going to be, I hope it will be a little bit more intense of learning so that you're able to get a rhythm in there.

And along the way that, as long as it's become more automated and also get more understanding, towards the business, you're able to actually creating, I would say, more relevant content for the platforms by leveraging our creators or by leveraging some of your own, I would say, resources from their third party, for example. So I think, yeah, it takes a little bit a learning curve, but I do think that the result will surprise you. And was the implication there, give it a month, like spend a month running ads, or is that not what you're saying? I think oftentimes we'll say a month minimum to run the ad because I think it's actually a learning curve for advertisers to really get into understanding the behavior and the platform.

And how many ads would you suggest, and I know there's not like a real thumb, but just how many ads would you suggest they try to run in that month to give you a real sense of like this could work or like no. The more or the better, I would say at least 10 different ad creatives would be ideal per week and the more the better. 10 per week? Oh wow. Okay, so 40 potentially.

Yeah, 10 per week. Also, I would say like, we can see that it is a little bit of, I was like a nuances there because a lot of it, oh, I don't have that resources. But as simple as possible, we can give you a tool, right? We have Capcut as a tool.

I created my anniversary video for my wife by using that tool. Don't tell her one minute, now everybody knows. But she thinks that it takes. She might not listen all the way this long. Yeah, she, she thinks it takes a lot of time. Actually, the production is amazing.

We're creating that tool specifically for our creator and also our advertiser and the user in general. So you're able to do a lot of, I will say, automated and customized the way in the app. So you're able to generating those content on your fingertips. So it will be a really good help for an advertiser that wanted to be more self-service, right? On the other hand, we also have third parties to, like, you know,

certified TikTok service providers on a creative side to help you. as well. So it depends on the level of our advertiser, you are. Is there a most common mistake people make when they try this out where you're just like often being like, you fool, here's what you did wrong? Is there something in there is just like, just don't do this thing? Because a lot of people make this mistake and then they fail on TikTok.

Yeah. The first one is like, I can see a lot of advertisers want to do instantly they want to do like remarketing or they want to do like a very small niche targeting on the platform because you're limiting yourself. Like I said, it is more about like, you know, get into the rhythm to understand more on the platform. So a broader targeting approach is actually recommended at the very early stage.

And most of advertisers are already doing that today. Because previously I can see that for the first two years in the business, especially when we acquire new advertisers, oftentimes they get on the platform, say, hey, I want to do this and that. Like, I want to really refine my targeting, etc. And then we just recommend, hey, why do we do this comparison? You have a campaign set up like this going on, But this is our recommendation and you can see the difference.

And literally, most of them, they will see a very big difference over there on it. Amazing. Ray, I know you have to run. I'm going to skip the lightning round, but let me ask you just one question from my lightning round. Do you have a favorite TikTok account that you've been just like really loving these days? I'll share mine real quick and then see if anything comes to mine. There's this lady who I found recently who does silent baby product reviews where her baby's like sleeping in the room. And she's like, shh.

And then she just goes through 20 different baby products, like very quietly, and it's hilarious. I'll link to it in the show notes. If you have a kid, you'll love it. Is there anything that you love or want to highlight? I do have one creator. I'm actually active following is on, like, he's a magician. He basically used very, I would say, very, like, normal things. It's just handy around him to make something that, you know, like very cool magic.

I always were like, you know, how did he make that? So I'm actually following that and getting more inspiration on myself. It's like, can I do that? No. I think that's more about my personal hobby to see something like that. It's very, very cool to see people can do these kind of tricks by using normal stuff around them. Ray, thank you so much for being here.

Two last questions. How can folks reach out if they ever want to learn more about the stuff, if they can? And how can listeners be useful to you? I think feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. If you want to discuss more about, like, you know, some of the go-to-market challenges you're facing, I think we're facing a lot of, I would say, similar challenges every single day. And also in terms of, you know, on a product setting point,

different companies have a different product philosophy. I don't think we are, like, always right. I was always recommending to receive a lot of feedbacks or recommendations, and that would be really, really nice to have to form these kind of, you know, leveraging your audience be my community to teach me a lesson sometimes. That would even better. Amazing. Ray, again, thank you so much for being here.

I feel like people don't have a ton of insight into the way TikTok operates and I appreciate making time to do this. No, it's a pleasure, Lenny. Thank you very much for having me. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review. as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com. See you in the next episode.