Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Karim Atiyeh
I went into it with, let's just look at the actual system that generates work and focus on how we can make that system as efficient as possible. I didn't go into it with, oh, I have better creative ideas than the people on those teams because we have amazing people. I just want to put their ideas in front of the world as quickly and as efficiently as possible. That's what I'm focused on. We have great creative people. They'll still come up with the ideas. But when they have an idea and I want to put it in front of someone, I want it to take 10 minutes, not two weeks. And if we do that, we can take a lot more shots on goal. We can take a lot more risk with the things that we do, because we know that if it doesn't work out, we could try something else tomorrow. And that's really the type of attitude that we went into it with. And I think that's helped us a ton. I actually have another example that I love. You could think about billboard advertising. If you want to put a billboard in New York, let's say it costs you $100,000. Funny thing with billboards is you don't really get that much economy of scale. If you want to put another billboard, it costs you $200,000. You want to put three billboards, $300,000. But if you want to change a billboard that you've already bought, it only costs you $1,000. So that means that if you have one billboard in Union Square and you want to change it tomorrow, that costs you another thousand dollars. You want to change it after tomorrow, that's another thousand dollars. So you can essentially have a billboard in Union Square that changes seven times in a week, and that's $107,000. Or you can have two static billboards for $200,000. I would argue that one billboard changing seven times in a week is a much more powerful way to drive a message and get a story out than two billboards, and it's a lot cheaper. So a lot of the attitude that we brought in is, how can we find these hacks and ways to get more out of the systems that exist? The creative is not really changing. I'm not trying to influence that, but the system through which we are doing marketing work is a lot more inquisitive and experimentation driven.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Karim Atiyeh
[00:00:00] S0: I love that one side of the system is getting more at bats. Let's call it the other side of the system is where are you getting hits? That feels also very complicated. Especially when it's like, we've talked about this, just to break the fourth wall, Ramp's our biggest sponsor, Senra's biggest sponsor. We've worked together very closely. Typically what we found in podcasts is the value—you just hear the name 4 million times and then eventually you need to solve the problem, you're like, oh yeah, Ramp. That feels harder to measure than an ad in Facebook or something where it's incredibly tight, the feedback loop. You're an engineer, I know you like tight feedback loops. How do you balance stuff that's harder to measure and assign value to it? [00:00:00] S1: You can either figure out what the exact value is, or you could think about it comparatively. So the way we've thought about it in working with you, which has been amazing, versus working with another random podcast is—I listen to your podcast a lot. I love it. I think a lot of people like me listen to your podcast. I think a lot of our audience is people like me who are building businesses and obsessing over businesses. If we decided that we wanted to work with podcasters who are the best in the world that we can work with, that have the right audience for us, and that's the lens, it's more about targeting the right audience than it is a higher-level metric—how many clicks am I getting or how many views am I getting? It's about getting the right views, and that's the way to think about it for us.
· Karim Atiyeh, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: You can either figure out what the exact value is, or you could think about it comparatively. So the way we've thought about it in working with you, which has been amazing, versus working with another random podcast is—I listen to your podcast a lot. I love it. I think a lot of people like me listen to your podcast. I think a lot of our audience is people like me who are building businesses and obsessing over businesses. If we decided that we wanted to work with podcasters who are the best in the world that we can work with, that have the right audience for us, and that's the lens, it's more about targeting the right audience than it is a higher-level metric—how many clicks am I getting or how many views am I getting? It's about getting the right views, and that's the way to think about it for us. [00:00:00] S0: If you were to step back and describe once more holistically, the system that you installed, how would you describe it? There was a diagram of the system that you came and installed in marketing to do everything you just described. What does the diagram look like?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Karim Atiyeh
[00:00:00] S0: If you were to step back and describe once more holistically, the system that you installed, how would you describe it? There was a diagram of the system that you came and installed in marketing to do everything you just described. What does the diagram look like? [00:00:00] S1: It's more about a principle. It's fast iteration cycles. It's scientific, where there's experimentation and feedback loops. It's letting the person who came up with the creative idea be accountable to that idea. It's not done by committee. You don't get to ask 10 people what they think and come up with a watered-down idea. You just do it. And if you do it well, you get credit for it. If you don't do it well enough times, eventually you will no longer be at the company—that needs to be known. People have more skin in the game when they're making those decisions and making sure that the tools that team has access to are not getting in the way, but are empowering you. We make a lot more use of AI tooling now in marketing than we used to. And today, if you want to put together an article on Ramp and you are on the SEO team or on the content marketing team and you want to generate an image for that article, we have a tool that was built internally that allows you to generate an image that is on brand within seconds. So it's quick experimentation, accountability with the person coming up with the creative, and tools that don't get in the way but allow you to get your work done very quickly with as little dependency as possible.
· Karim Atiyeh, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: It's more about a principle. It's fast iteration cycles. It's scientific, where there's experimentation and feedback loops. It's letting the person who came up with the creative idea be accountable to that idea. It's not done by committee. You don't get to ask 10 people what they think and come up with a watered-down idea. You just do it. And if you do it well, you get credit for it. If you don't do it well enough times, eventually you will no longer be at the company—that needs to be known. People have more skin in the game when they're making those decisions and making sure that the tools that team has access to are not getting in the way, but are empowering you. We make a lot more use of AI tooling now in marketing than we used to. And today, if you want to put together an article on Ramp and you are on the SEO team or on the content marketing team and you want to generate an image for that article, we have a tool that was built internally that allows you to generate an image that is on brand within seconds. So it's quick experimentation, accountability with the person coming up with the creative, and tools that don't get in the way but allow you to get your work done very quickly with as little dependency as possible. [00:00:00] S0: Through this process, I love the billboard example. So I'm curious: what are the next three like that? What are the most surprising things you discovered about different channels or different ways of doing things? Anything else come to mind from the year of marketing adventure?
· Karim Atiyeh
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah, there are things that have always been true in paid marketing or what happens in social media—you get a lot of these concepts and patterns that work incredibly effectively in paid advertising for a very short period of time and stop working. So it's very important to always be at the forefront of what is happening there and why it's working, until all the alpha space starts being taken away and it stops working. And I'll give you actually an example from the Paribus days, because I don't want to give away all our secret sauce either, because I think that was a very powerful one. But when Facebook introduced video ads in the news feed, I think in 2014 or '15, that was a new thing at that time. When they first introduced it, you'd scroll through your news feed and the videos would just play immediately with the sound. And people were really annoyed and bothered. And Facebook then decided to make those video ads not play the sound by default. And when that happened, the effectiveness of video ads on Facebook dropped drastically. So they got cheaper as a result. But the videos that became really effective were the ones where you could tell what was happening essentially without the sound. So one of our most effective video ads at Paribus we ran very early when that was starting to happen, when Facebook had made that change—Eric and I were dressed in banana costumes holding signs with text on them. It's a great silent video because you look at that image and it's, what are these people doing dressed in banana costumes? And you're holding signs with text on them, so you can actually tell what's happening without having to listen because you can read. And that ad became very effective and it worked very, very well for three or four months, and then it stopped working. And that is very true in online advertising. It's moving so quickly, and the platforms that you're doing ads on top of are changing so quickly. So being at the forefront of what's happening and how you can get alpha is super important. So we want to hire people who are obsessed, aware of the changes happening with those systems, et cetera. That's also true in SEO, right?