00:43:20 · Sandy Diao, Guillaume Moubeche
But I I think right now, what I'm seeing and probably the way I recommend growth teams to think about it now, is really thinking of ourselves as individuals who are responsible for growth to be general orchestrators. Figure out what is worth automating, but figure out the manual stuff first. Because if you don't have the manual stuff down, there's no point in scaling it. And that agent's only gonna be as good as the underlying assumptions and logic behind, like, why we did this thing in the first place. [00:43:51] S1: And when you join, like, a a company to to advise them, like, what's your typical process? Like, what are the steps you go through to kind of analyze what's working, what's not working, and what can be done better?
00:44:03 · Sandy Diao
[00:44:03] S0: Great question. The first step that I take when I meet a company is I just kind of wanna hear from them what their growth challenges are. And the second thing that I do is I pair that with an audit of what actually is happening in the business. And the realization that we typically have at the end of that process is that our assumptions on what's working or what our problems are are typically not actually what's happening in the business itself. So that tends to be the early on process. And then we have to align on what are the growth problems that we meaningfully want to solve. From there, it's figuring out, you know, what are the the the quick wins or the fast things that we can do to show some initial lift and impact so that we can have confidence to continue to double down or continue to invest in other things. That tends to be my road map. And then from there, we build something a little bit more long term. That's like, okay. Here are good foundational things that we should probably invest in and do, but we don't have to do right away. So an example is some quick win type of things that we tend to do early on. I mentioned this concept earlier, but what I've seen in most, probably a 100% of early stage startups I worked with is there are power power law outcomes to user acquisition. Firstly, every business wants to solve user acquisition. Even if they have tons of users, they're like, oh, I'm afraid it'll dry up at some point, and it's not sustainable, and it's not scalable, etcetera. So everyone has that problem. But what I've seen for every business I've I've worked with or ever touched is that parallel outcomes drive the results, meaning that one or two channels drive the majority of users. Again here, meaning that we need to figure out what those best fit channels are. And one of the inclinations that a lot of teams I work with tend to have is they wanna test more and more channels. So they're all saying, what do think about influencer? What do think about paid ads? What do you think about Reddit? What do you think about, you know, all these like different referral programs and everything else? And my response to that usually is, I don't think you should be testing all these all at once. We should find out which channels have the best fit for your product.
00:45:53 · Sandy Diao, Guillaume Moubeche
So for example, if you have a product that's very socially shareable, very visual, let's start with social channels first, cause you're gonna have a better fit there. Or if you have a product that has a lot of existing demand, a lot of people understand, maybe consumer product, let's focus on paid first or SEO. So it it really kinda depends on the the the setup of the product itself. And then, you know, we we launch an experiment or two, and that gets us really strong results. Either it works like crazy well, and we're like, wow. We should hire a paid specialist, or we should hire an agency, or it goes, oh, wow. I thought for the longest time that this was going to work, and it and it didn't work. Let's move on to the next thing. But that's typically how the road map looks, and it's also the same approach that I take when I'm full, you know, full time in house in a team, and my mandate is also to, you know, to grow the team. [00:46:40] S1: And what do you think when when you look at a at a growth moat for a company, what do you think have changed before AI versus now? What kind of moats do you feel will remain stronger and the one that will actually not be as strong as as they used to be?
00:47:02 · Sandy Diao
[00:47:02] S0: It's a really interesting question. I think about this one a lot. What is going to be a moat with growth? Well, here's how I view it. I think that firstly, when people ask, like, what your moat is, it's this unique competitive advantage that's supposed to sustain for the long term. But I think by definition, in the world of AI, there is going to be very few growth modes that remain the same. In fact, I think that growth modes are always constantly going to be changing depending on the size, the scale of the company, and just distribution channels themselves are changing. So by definition, you cannot have a persistent growth mode that is gonna take you from, you know, c to series a and series a to c and c plus. Right? It's just... It's not gonna work that way anymore. And one of the reasons that's true is because, again, the distribution channels are changing, things are just working a lot faster. Also, the nature of these distribution channels, like GEO or generative engine optimization, products are now being served on a platter to users. Right? Users are asking, what is this exact product that I need for my specific profile with all this context about, like, what this model understands about me? That model will just say, like, here's the thing you should use. Right? There's no more comparison. There's no more reading these lists of, like, check boxes that says, like, this solution is better than the other. There's a little bit of that and, you know, sort of referencing it. But, you know, for the most part, products are being brought closer to the point of per... Conversion with AI as one of these distribution channels. And same with video content. Right? Algorithms are getting better and better at surfacing content that is unique and custom to you, and so you don't need to do that much more research the same way that you would have been in sort of this pre AI world. And so in order to succeed here, the growth mode itself is, like, one, being adaptable and making sure that you're constantly checking on and making sure that you're aware of and changing how your distribution works. But but two, I would say that this other concept that, you know, I referenced earlier as well, finding what your natural distribution advantage is is even more important.
00:48:59 · Sandy Diao
So we need to figure out essentially for the product that we have, what are some of the unique channels that we're gonna have a leg up in? You know how when investors talk about their conversations with founders or the companies they invest in? They say, I'm looking for a founder with unfair advantages. They're basically saying, I'm looking for a founder who's gonna be better at doing this than other people. I think growth works the same way. You need to find your unfair growth advantages, which is to say, I don't wanna play the fair game of running ads like everybody else. I don't wanna play the fair game of being competitive with everyone else. You wanna say, I wanna play the unfair game of the channel in which I have a leg up. So like the Descript example that we talked about, Descript is a product that is gonna be socially shareable because its users create content. So let's lean into channels like affiliates and influencers and paid social advertising. Right? And on the other hand, if you're a b to b product, you wanna figure out what are some of the channels that you have there. A lot of business products are collaboration oriented. How do we really make the product collaborative? How do we really make invites a part of the product experience? So, you know, we really wanna lean in to start out with that. And even more so in the era of AI, lean into those early on and as hard as possible. And then, of course, adapt that strategy as time progresses because the mode itself, the distribution channels themselves are constantly evolving.
00:50:21 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:50:21] S1: I love it. And at some point, you talked a bit about b two c versus b two v, and there is actually a a third, I would say, category, which are, like, prosumers. Can you maybe elaborate on on this?