Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:41:10 · Lenny Rachitsky, Christina Gilbert
[00:41:10] S1: What is the latest with OneSchema? I know you now work with some of my favorite companies like Ramp, Vanta, Scale, and Watershed. I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from especially tricky systems like ERPs. [00:41:25] S2: Yes. So we just launched OneSchema File Feeds, which allows you to build an integration with any system in fifteen minutes as long as you can export a CSV to an SFTP folder. We see our customers all the time getting stuck with hacks and workarounds, and the product teams that we work with don't have to turn down prospects because their systems are too hard to integrate with. We allow our customers to offer thousands of integrations without involving their engineering team at all. [00:41:47] S1: I can tell you that if my team had to build integrations like this, how nice would it be to be able to take this off my road map and instead use something like one schema and not just to build it, but also to maintain it forever. [00:41:59] S2: Absolutely, Lenny. We've heard so many horror stories of multi day outages from even just a handful of bad records. We are laser focused on integration reliability to help teams end all of those distractions that come up with integrations. We have a built in validation layer that stops any bad data from entering your system, and OneSchema will notify your team immediately of any data that looks incorrect.
00:42:18 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:42:18] S1: I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust. Christina, thank you for joining us. And if you wanna learn more, head on over to 1schema.co. That's 1schema.co. Let me, summarize the first five real quick, and then we'll keep going. So the first is wait longer than you think to hire a head of growth. Wait until your product market fit, maybe a million ARR, especially if you're self serve oriented. Number two is if your if your growth is declining, the head of growth won't solve that problem. First, stop the decline at least. Third is redesigning your homepage, marketing page. Rebranding is not only not gonna help you grow, it's gonna probably hurt growth and slow things down. And so just go into that why... Eyes wide open. Four is don't just copy the competition and assume they know what they're doing and assume that what they do is gonna work for you. Use it as inspiration. On the other hand, look at ins... Get inspiration from experts, competition, trends, things like that to help you solve your problem, which you think is no one solved before. It turns out every problem you're solving someone has solved in some way, most likely.
00:43:29 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:43:29] S0: Yes. Especially in growth. I mean, I know this can apply to a lot of product management and to marketing as well. But in growth, when you're talking about how do I lift activation or I have a really big drop off between activation and monetization, these things are a lot more patternized than you would expect them to be. So go and find those patterns as opposed to trying to reengineer it. [00:43:54] S1: Awesome. Okay, let's keep going. Number six.
00:43:56 · Elena Verna
[00:43:56] S0: All right. So next one. Next one is a little spicy one too. And that is as part of growth, you owning some channels. A lot of growth teams own acquisition. So owning channels and growth prioritizing SEO, SEM, social is one of the biggest mistakes I think a growth team can do. Now, obviously, I'm not saying don't do SEO or don't do SEM, so organic search or paid search. I'm saying that. However, as a growth team, your number one priority is to create your owned or your earned channel. So channel that you've earned and that nobody else can compete in but you. What do I mean by that? When you're doing organic search or paid search, you're making Google richer. Great for Google. Google is an incredible company, but by dumping money into paid marketing, you are paying them and you're paying for their distribution and access to their distribution. If you're doing social too, like you're doing, let's say, Instagram or whatnot, paid advertising in Instagram, that's great. But all of that works on algorithm. An algorithm can giveth, but algorithm can also taketh away at any point. And you have no control because you don't own those channels. You are playing with other players and you're competing against them in somebody else's channel. Now, on the other side, there can be your own earned channel. What is an earned channel? This really goes into the concept of product led growth acquisition, which means you're relying on virality, on word-of-mouth, on user generated content in order to attract new acquisition through top of the funnel. So why is that earned? And why do I put that above, let's say, organic search, which is SEO obviously is wonderful. But again, search just goes to Google. That's great. Versus if you build your own user generated content and your own community, nobody else can compete with you in that. That is yours. Your competitors cannot buy their eyeballs. There are people who are going to be attracting other people. Referrals from people to people are everything. So, Lenny, if I, let's say, I sign up for, say, Superhuman and I invite you into it, that is much stronger acquisition tactic versus you looking for and finding Superhuman, let's say, on paid marketing advertisements.
00:46:33 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
And especially with our age right now where search as an interface is changing towards AI interface, and the AI interface is giving a lot less credit to all of the content. Content is almost becoming a database. And there's a new UI that is being developed on it. Before it was Google was the UI, and now AI is coming in with a new UI, and there's not as much control that you have over this new UI that is being developed. Focusing on these earned channels that you own becomes the utmost priority. And if you don't have them on your growth roadmap, you are going to be in some really big trouble over the next year to two years because your cost of acquisition is only going to go up, your competition in those channels is only going to go up, you're constantly going to be praying to algorithm gods to giveth your way, but again, they can take it at any point. And it's really one of those fundamental growth team failure points if they don't spend enough time on virality and user generated content to create their own earned acquisition. [00:47:47] S1: Wow. Okay. This is incredible. This is its own podcast episode in theory that we could do of how to actually do this. We're not gonna cover the strategy. Also, this may not necessarily work for every company. Your point is that's... You can grow other ways, but this is by far the most powerful, most effective, cheapest, most likely to succeed if you can figure this out.
00:48:07 · Elena Verna, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:48:07] S0: It's not cheapest. It's actually cost a lot of product and engineering and even marketing resources to stand up. So it's just... It's not the cost of a budget, but it's cost of people that will have to work to create your own channel, so to speak, for acquisition. And you're right. Maybe that's not for everybody, but it's actually applicable to more products than people realize because every single product has some sort of team functionality, some sort of roles that they need to do. Every product can drive word-of-mouth loop. Not all loops, actually, that's not true. Not every product can drive word-of-mouth loop, but they can drive recommendations and they can create user generated content. One of those tactics usually applies to at least one product. So there is an opportunity to create some sort of earned channel, even though it might feel unnatural at the beginning, depending on how you reach PMF and how you've scaled in the first couple of stages of it. But if you're not exploring it and if you're not investing into it or at least trying and failing within it, I think that you are really leaving too much of your growth future into the hands of somebody else that you have no control over. [00:49:19] S1: So the advice here is your growth team, it's okay if they work on SEM, paid growth basically, and SEO, but most of your effort and investment should be in earned channel... Own channels, specifically virality user generated content.