Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:50:05 · Lenny Rachitsky, Hector Serrano
[00:50:05] S0: Got it. Okay. And then is there anyone else that you find important valuable on that team early on and even later on? [00:50:11] S1: Early... Like, if we go back to the early early days, the marketing team was Daniel, our CMO, Matt, who was our head of growth before Eric came, and then it was me just, like, as a sole creator, kind of just making the ads myself. So... And then we had some external agencies here and there. And then slowly, we added on design. We added on an in house, like, director to help produce films and launch videos. Then we introduced, like, PR recently. And, like, even even now, I think we're still pretty lean. I think it might be, like, 15 people on the marketing team, like, full time. We have a creator partnership leads for, like, influencers. We have a celebrity talent manager who, like, helps us close celebrities and and things like that. So even then, it's still pretty lean, and everyone is, like, experts in their domain, and it's all very flat. We all just have free reign. We all do what we're best at. There's no real... There's no really middle management. And then tour... Our tour CMO, Daniel, who's an absolute legend, he just had a bunch of direct reports. So I feel sorry for his calendar, but, yeah, that's that's kind of how everything is structured. It's, like, very flat, nominal managers, and everyone just does their work. [00:51:22] S0: Is the core kind of takeaway from this conversation that when you're doing paid today, that UGC videos are the way to go versus your own ads that you're just kinda creating.
00:51:22 · Lenny Rachitsky, Hector Serrano
[00:51:22] S0: Is the core kind of takeaway from this conversation that when you're doing paid today, that UGC videos are the way to go versus your own ads that you're just kinda creating. [00:51:34] S1: So are you kinda comparing to, like, what I was doing versus what we're doing now? [00:51:37] S0: You know, just, like, when you think paid ads on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, most people think I create a video promoting my product or create, like, an ad unit that is, hey. Wispr Flow isn't the best thing. And what you're doing here is you're having other people create the videos and then running that as the ad.
00:51:52 · Hector Serrano
[00:51:52] S1: Yeah. So the way I look at it is, like, I was basically a in house UGC creator, and it got to a point where ad spend was getting too high. And, like, I'm only human, and I couldn't I couldn't make that many videos. And I was also getting into, like, a year plus of making ads. So, naturally, I was getting pretty burnt out being a one man show. And, I was like, okay. I have the skill set. I'm a decent creator. I can spot, like, good creators as well. Why not just build a team? And that's, like, an extension of myself. And, yeah, that's that's basically what we did, and we're able to scale a lot faster, test more ideas. Since we have more ad spend, we obviously want more concepts running. And, also, like, once you get to a pretty high budget on ads, your ads are typically gonna reach fatigue a lot faster. And especially with Andromeda now, ads reach fatigue even a lot faster. Because before... In 2024 when we were running ads, I could have an ad running for twelve months. And I mean, my my output would be a lot less, but now an ad with not only the new updates, but also how much ad spend we're running, an ad... Once it hits, like, a $100,000 in ad spend, will be dead, and that can be hit in, like, a month or in two weeks, three weeks. So we constantly need more output, more volume, etcetera. And I think that if you look at our ad library, we might have, like, 5,000 lifetime ads and maybe, like, 800 live currently or something like that or 900 live currently. And it's because, again, they reach fatigue, and then we have to turn them off. But our ad our ad set or our ad library isn't only full of UGC videos. There's a lot of different things as well. And, yeah, everything from, like, statics to, like, high celebrity slash influencer videos to in house ads to, like, launch videos that we package as ads to, like, founder led things. So there's a lot of variety in there, and this is just basically, I I guess just having as many formats as possible because, again, we have a lot of ad spend, and we want... The more variety, the better at the end
00:53:44 · Lenny Rachitsky, Hector Serrano
[00:53:44] S0: of the day. Okay. So this is just a a core leg to the stool of paid ads as EGC. Exactly. Clearly working. Do you think this will work for every company? Is this something most BPs... I don't know. Yeah. Does this... Do you think this won't work? [00:53:58] S1: I think this works for everyone. It's like it goes back to what I was saying. It's just finding those users that can speak to the users you wanna acquire. And at the end of day, one thing that we look at at Wispr is, like, the b to b side and the enterprise side is all made up of individuals. And if you can find a way to make your content speak to an individual who's part of those teams, and maybe you get them as, like, a solo... How would you say? Like, a solo customer or whatever to download the app, then use it, then they tell a friend in the company, and then more people in the company start using it. And then maybe you chase down those enterprise clients and actually close the deal. Like, that's realistically how most companies can approach that at the end of the day. And it's not like, oh, like, who from x company is gonna watch my video and, like, hop on an enterprise call and, like, wanna close or whatever. But I think if you, like, approach it from, like, companies are made up of people and you just look at it like that and you think, okay. How how do I wanna sell to these people and how would these people respond well to getting sold to? I think you just have to break it down super simply and you're like, oh, yeah. This would work for anyone.
00:53:58 · Hector Serrano, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:53:58] S1: I think this works for everyone. It's like it goes back to what I was saying. It's just finding those users that can speak to the users you wanna acquire. And at the end of day, one thing that we look at at Wispr is, like, the b to b side and the enterprise side is all made up of individuals. And if you can find a way to make your content speak to an individual who's part of those teams, and maybe you get them as, like, a solo... How would you say? Like, a solo customer or whatever to download the app, then use it, then they tell a friend in the company, and then more people in the company start using it. And then maybe you chase down those enterprise clients and actually close the deal. Like, that's realistically how most companies can approach that at the end of the day. And it's not like, oh, like, who from x company is gonna watch my video and, like, hop on an enterprise call and, like, wanna close or whatever. But I think if you, like, approach it from, like, companies are made up of people and you just look at it like that and you think, okay. How how do I wanna sell to these people and how would these people respond well to getting sold to? I think you just have to break it down super simply and you're like, oh, yeah. This would work for anyone. [00:54:57] S0: Okay, that makes sense. Also what I'm hearing though is it's probably most effective for kind of product led growth, bottom up sort of products, not like a Workday or a Salesforce, more like a, yeah, Wispr Flow or Notion and [00:55:10] S1: things like
00:55:10 · Hector Serrano, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:55:10] S1: things like [00:55:11] S0: that. Awesome. And you know, like if you think about it, it makes so much sense why this would work. An influencer innately is someone that influences you to do something. You're basically getting influencerscreators to create content that pitches the product, and then you put them in people's feed through paid ads, and I get why it works because they're there trying to convince them how [00:55:31] S1: awesome also think that a good distinction as well is, like, it's not just an influencer or a creator. I almost think that creators with no following end up being better investments for brands because influencers kind of were seen now as sellouts a lot of the time and like when you see a big face or a big celebrity like selling a product, it's like, oh my gosh. This person has been selling me things for like the last ten years. I know she's just getting a bag or he's just getting a bag, and they're not really genuine. And there's something about, like, not really knowing who the person is, and they're not famous. They don't have a lot of followers. And if you have, like, these partnership ads coming from their account, it just feels a lot more genuine as well. So [00:56:06] S0: just wanted It's feel that like the less they look like an influencer. [00:56:09] S1: Exactly.