Leveraging Marketing for your Product

NO team, nothing. The one and only marketing person to hold down the fort known as Stripe (First Marketing hire) for over 3 years before forming a team. Only to go on and brave the storms at one of the most chaotic growth companies of our time - OpenAI (First Marketing Hire, VP of Marketing) to then settle down at Thrive Capital (Executive in Residence, Marketing) nurturing young’uns (startups) to grow at scale.

Guess who decided to show up at Lenny’s? Its Krithika S. folks!

She is here to share how to improve your marketing with her mountain of achievements to back it up.

This is Abdur, I’ll be your host today to summarize what groundbreaking information was exchanged at Lenny’s Podcast and I’ll be adding in my own notes here and there, comparing my own experiences to Krithika’s insights.

In this article you’ll learn:

Krithika’s four step process for marketing (DATE framework)
Her Anti-playbook playbook (How to beat your competitor)
How Marketing at OpenAI is different to your traditional marketing (Marketing is Education)
How to position your product in the market? (Being Cheaper is not better)
How Marketing at Stripe is different to your traditional marketing (Marketing is Developer Relations)
What is Capital “M” marketing and Small “m” Marketing? (Paid ads, Organic Channels vs Brand Identity and User Experience)
How did she approach marketing at Retool? (Marketing is user stories)
How can marketing help you?
When to Hire a marketing person?
What goes into working in an Investment Firm? (Thrive Capital)

Now, then the pleasantries have been exchanged. Let’s get into it!

Anti-playbook Playbook

Open AI had the fastest growing product in all of history - ChatGPT. Why would a product like ChatGPT need Marketing?

When you think about all the different stages of funnel, awareness was clearly not the problem that ChatGPT or OpenAI had.

Everyone knew ChatGPT but when you go one zoom level further, they didn’t know what to use it for!

Krithika was focused on creating a use-case epiphany for users in different walks of life to better leverage the capabilities of ChatGPT.

What is Marketing? Marketing can help people understand how to use your product

There was no pre-defined playbook that Krithika followed at OpenAI or Stripe. Rather it was her understanding of - the context of the company: what problem does it solve? || the competitive landscape of the company: who are you up against? || Leveraging the when, where and how a company operated

If you are just doing the same things or if you just see the outcomes or outputs of the strategy that you are trying to imitate, just to follow in the footsteps without paying attention to the inputs of the variables that lead to that strategy in the first place - you wouldn’t have an advantage over the other.

Positioning your Product

Gaining insights from customer becomes somewhat of a cheat code on how to position your product in the market.

Think of it like a three-legged race (Product + Customer + Marketer) instead of a baton-handing-over marathon (Product->Marketer->Customer).

As a Marketer, engaging with developers and doing customer support will provide many insights on how the product was made and how it is being perceived. This can help bridge the gap between the two.

As far as pricing models are concerned, there is a value-creation prospect to AI that do not necessarily fit in with your traditional SAAS based pricing or even usage-based pricing. Krithika thinks there are new frontiers left to be explored -> where is the value?

How to approach marketing? (DATE Framework)

(D)

Diagnose the problem - This usually means, when a founder comes to you talking about hiring a demand generation lead, you have to talk about the likelihood of closing leads in the first place - whenever they enter at the top of the funnel. Because, if you cannot close them, you have a leaky funnel, and no amount of demand gen would lead to closing them in.

This part tells you astutely whether or not you have a product market fit. Once you are in the room and people are converting, you have found that problem statement that

is critical to them
that is hurting them the most and
that your solution is resonating as a solve to that problem.

Note

As a consultant, starting at the lowest of the low (5000Rs. for 2-3 months!), I worked my way up finally started writing proposals touching the 1L - 2L per project value, courtesy of my LinkedIn presence and work history - all organic, no shortcuts.

Yet, it remains a hard problem to close these clientele who were initially interested in what I had to offer yet left for some reason or the other. I now realize that it’s got to do with product-market fit and the mitigation lies in productizing my services. Hear me out with this case study about Client A,

Client A approached me to develop a podcast app with voice integration features through LinkedIn. The talks went on for over a week - I gave them an ETA after some negotiating to justify the fact that I have not worked on a project such as this before. I also gave them a budget that was within their turf. I laid out a contract, furnished it with termination clauses, and what not. They left stating they found a better match elsewhere. I asked them for feedback but only got ghosted instead.

Now, from Krithika’s insights I could learn that what the client expected was assurance (in bold) as well as a quick job. I now realize that the client was prompted to think twice before closing the deal as they were not interested or satisfied with what I had to offer. Since I couldn’t give it to them, there was no product-market fit. My service gets randomized requests so much that, it has become a chore to provide them what they ask for within the timeline and budget that they ask for.

The solution is simple, just take out the randomness and be clear about your niche. Simply productize your service and lay out what the client can expect from the get-go. For example:

Get your e-commerce app within a blink!

This does three things,

Eliminates randomness
Allows you to easily price for the market
Allows you to instantly provide them what they want because you know what they want now, whenever someone appears at the top of the funnel.

You can even drive point 3 to home with having generic templates or boilerplates ready for that particular due to having already known what the client would ask for.

If you get a lot of interest but also get a lot of questions like, how you compare to X? or what is it that you do?, then it usually means that there is a lot to be done in the product-market fit zone rather than throwing in more leads at the top of the funnel.

According to Krithika, a perfect product marketer does the following things,

Competitive differentiation
Positioning
Sales enablement

this and more of anything that gets more people through the bottom. This is the diagnostic step.

(A)

Analyzing the competitors’ approaches. But it’s not what you think it is.

It’s not about being laser focused on the competition because that leads to these local maxima rather than bringing in phase shift changes and breakthroughs that we could make as a company. When evaluating competitors, analyzing what others in this space do, gives you a baseline to work with, that helps us identify opportunities and gaps and niches that your company can take in and stack.

(T)

Intentionally take a different path than what everyone else is doing.

Driving a strategy that sets the company apart (unique value proposition) is very core to the discipline of marketing, ensuring the differentiation in the market.

Where to get inspiration?

Krithika usually goes out far from her domain rather than directly looking at her competitors. She crosses a pie, steals the strategy of this random restaurant (example) and integrates it into her own domain’s vertical stack.

(E)

Experiment, test, validate and scale what works.

We need to have the ability to throw away work. If something is not working, don’t double down on it. The bias of sunken cost fallacy really comes into play once you pour your heart and soul into your strategy that doesn’t work.

Give people the psychological safe space to fail and once we find out what works, really double down on that.

With differentiation, what are your thoughts on saying that you are a lot better or cheaper?

Being cheaper is a race to the bottom, especially when you think about scaling laws and how things are playing out, as models get cheaper and more capable, being cheaper is not really a durable approach in the market.

Doing things differently is not just for the sake of it. It’s that novelty and the differentiation that people are craving for, they are not looking for yet another tool in the market, they are looking for something that aligns with their values, aligns with what their goals are.

Note

This is where I fell again. I took on this humungous task of catering to the different needs of these randomized projects, so much so that that I can’t give what the client wants at the satisfaction rate at which they expect since I am very much generalized in expertise. I think this also comes down to narrowing down on a niche and productizing your service so that both the client and you, know what to expect before initiating contact. At the start of my journey, making my services cheaper only got me more into the ground.

If we are really crisp on understanding the goals of the client, the user need, understanding the problem space that they are operating, the one-two check of product plus marketing would be very powerful for your company

Outbound channels for creating awareness
Lot of marketing metrics are vanity metrics, focus more on the experience that the customer undergoes

Really what you should be focusing on is the signups, self-serving product and in terms of b2b sales leads and revenue driving pipeline

Paid social channels didn’t do well for retool since developers probably use ad blockers, what kind of dev would click on a paid ad?

With Retool, Krithika realized that she had terrific traction with people who have paid for the product, who have used the product and are expanding with the product. She figured out that letting them tell a story is much more compelling and no other company could replicate the kind of customer that retool had.

She then experimented with different event formats - webinars, sales dinners etc., to find out what clicked

She let go of some of the channels too because in the surface they seemed to be working but underneath they don’t push the leads well into the pipeline

How Krithika leveraged blogs at Stripe

With Stipe Connect, the competition was to become a payment facilitator. Krithika needed Stripe to rank higher in SEO for people searching for payment facilitation to come find them. “How do we rank for pay fac without talking about payment facilitation?” - was the problem that she needed to solve first.

She basically brought about this reverse RFP system using their blogs saying: “Hey do you want to become a payment facilitator? here is the playbook - and btw if this feels annoying you should use stripe connect instead”

All the things marketing at Stripe Focus on how to authentically reach the audience

The importance of deep product understanding. You couldn’t really playact understanding the product if you want to show results. Krithika couldn’t even playact because she was the only marketing person.

(with respect to playacting) Developers are trained to spot bugs, right? They will find bugs in the code; they will find bugs in the marketing. In this case, “marketing is an extension of the product itself”.

You have to hold yourself to a high bar in terms of how we communicate about the product

What does marketing add to a product like Stripe?

Your launch isn’t complete unless your customers are aware of the features and start using it. So, usage became the Nord Star. The binary of whether the product or feature has launched or not.

Most of her work was around redefining “what does a launch mean?”

Krithika thought “How do we invest in this fanatical community and leverage their excitement about the product experience?” - “Developer relations” with a capital D

What was Stripe?

Stripe transformed from a single product into a multi-product ecosystem

Marketing became the work of figuring out the correct set of products that developers in a particular niche would go crazy for - “curation”

Developers are a highly skeptical bunch which also meant that the baseline bar for content quality was set very high

Krithika and others who followed had this ritual of looking at the biggest customer support issues to turn them into shareable docs. All new hires would do a support rotation just to build empathy with their customers so that marketing could better cater to them.

Stripe was built on users first philosophy. It meant Krithika, on a regular basis spent around 20% of time talking to users and non-users about the product at hand.

This gave way to what Krithika calls a “fountain of understanding”. It helped Krithika identify key areas where people are confused about. Krithika defines “talking to customers and using their language to describe their problems” as a cheat code for fantastic product marketing and messaging. She further adds, “You want them nodding their heads while reading your landing pages”

Example: “Do you process subscription payments or recurring payments?”, “Can I pay people out with Stripe?” - These customer support tickets became a stack ranked backlog of landing pages that Stipe would go on to produce whose sole purpose is to educate people

Landing pages are also meant to educate people, not just tell your story

This will really help you if you have a strong top of the funnel demand. Krithika further adds that, “A fantastic marketing funnel often never looks like topping the sales, it looks like a self-directed educational experience, even the sales process ends up very consulted with technical folks being on the other side”

What can I bring to the table as a new marketing hire?

Conjure up a great program to figure out what content that you have to prioritize.

Talking to customers is at the top of the list for things that you could bring in as a new marketer

Need to be a marketing generalist and then go to a cone shaped specialty marketing. Go deeper into a domain whenever it is useful for the company.

On Scaling Teams

Typically, startups avoid internal reviews since they are all about velocity. But Krithika is a big advocate of reviews to check team alignment for core values. Why is that so?

A good or sufficient process is something that speeds up a company rather than slow it down.

Marketing is an extension of the product. It is the first touchpoint of your product that people can interact with. It’s what you do here that matters the most in reeling the consumers in. If your team is not aligned with the core values, they would definitely get the brand messaging wrong and draw in the wrong crowd.

Consistency in reviews is really important. Especially in hypergrowth startups, scaling teams is the part and parcel of what you are trying to do. You want the new hires on the week 2 to just be as self-sufficient as those who have worked in the company for over 2 years! Converting the experience of the veterans into digestible information that can be put to the test practically will definitely boost efficiency at scale. Things like “I have built a lot of social capital to get something done”, “I know the unspoken rules of the company” or “I know which conference room to stand out of to get the founder to review this piece of content before it goes out” - these are not necessarily common knowledge but imagine if they were.

Setting up these processes with the intention of helping new hires ease into the fray and help them navigate to go from idea to execution can be very empowering and powerful.

When to hire a Krithika (a marketer)?

The first criterion is to have product-market fit else you might be throwing fuel into fire.

What type of marketing does your company need the most?

One pillar to think of is product marketing, if you have a high velocity engineering organization that is putting out a lot of features the customers are not able to keep track of, maybe the engagement is not so high for some of the newer features or some of the core features that you might have had in the past that got lost in the hubbub.

A product marketer could bring in launch excellence (customer knows exactly what is in the box) and customer engagement, bringing in differentiation in the market.

Second pillar is probably Demand Generation. You might think about community development as a big part of what you do as a company. It really depends on whether you find the spark of product market fit

Distinguishing on “Captial M” marketing and “lowercase m” marketing

m - what do you stand for as a company? What do you tell the press as a founder?

M - lead gen, conversion etc., etc.,

The case study of Claude vs ChatGPT: Claude is better but ChatGPT is dominating. How?

While Claude is focused on becoming a better coding assistant, ChatGPT has taken a more generalized approach to cater to a diverse audience of users

Orientation that comes to large language models or AI in general is that we are in the beginning of this paradigm shift, every single week there is a new breakthrough - It results in two things. Either there is a shorter and smaller delta between your expectations and reality and when your expectations are exceeded it brings in your loyalty to the brand and then there is negative delta, something that detracts people away from your brand.

Long term orientation - it’s not about which is the best chatbot how does AI become a positive force for humanity, it is about how AI is going to permeate every part of our lives. Krithika hopes that companies are not focused on competition but rather thinking about the paradigm shift that needs to happen to benefit the society at large.

Krithika’s work in Thrive Capital

When asked about Krithika’s dynamic career and on tips to identify the best company to work with as an employee, she recalled a quote from Claire Johnson, the CEO of stripe on this exact subject. She states that there are three things to look out for when choosing a company,

People - Are these people ones that push your thinking and are genuinely interesting people? Because you are going to spend a lot of time with them moving forward and having these qualities will expose you to different problems and raise your awareness in a particular field.

Product - Do you go to sleep thinking of the product, wanting to put it into the hands of more people?

Potential - Not just the potential of the company but the potential of your discipline to have an impact on the company’s trajectory. When you have that kind of potent combination it drives your perspective on what’s draining, what’s energizing

The Ethos

As Executive in residence (at Thrive Captial), the best thing to bring to the table is your adaptability. To really diagnose rather than trying to spot patterns and themes and playbooks, to be very deep in the trenches with them (the startups) to understand their unique concerns, products and values and what they want to bring into their world. (in order to help them scale)

The startups that are exciting to work with are the ones that go into uncharted territories by trying something new, that has been never done before.

Conclusion

How to differentiate in the age of Generative AI? If anything, taste is going to be a distinguishing factor in the age of AI. There is so much drivel that can be generated by AI on a daily basis, which will be viewed by the consumers. The companies that can distinguish themselves are the ones that show their craft, with true understanding of their product and true understanding of their customer to connect the two in meaningful ways. If they use AI to augment their efforts, then it is better than subsuming their efforts or delegating to AI entirely. To build taste, doing that would be a differentiator for companies to stand out.

How to build taste?

To build taste is to increase your exposure to different things