00:20:27 · Adam, Henry Innis
[00:20:27] S2: you find that before you sort of broke into that system? Like, did you find it was hard to... Was it hard to meet people? Was it hard to understand the terminology? [00:20:33] S0: I found it very confronting. So Yeah. My first pitch deck, which was just a pitch deck to to... I think it was Jethro Cohen and Casey Flint at Square Peg. It was 58 pages of like a jargon garbage text. Like you have no idea how bad this text was. You can see that. Right? Yeah, they do. Yeah. Like, like in agencies, they absolutely do. Like, you have like a single word on a slide. And like, that's a thing rather than like detailed execution plans had zero metrics on it, like zero metrics. And we came to this, businessman and I were like, this is so good. Blah blah blah. Really told the story here and like, it's complete fucking garbage. And I reckon like completely tanked all for every internally at square beg the ages. And and poor Jethro, like, it came in introducing us and I like tried to get to know me and things like that. He's done an amazing job. Right? But like, we had no idea what the standard was and anything like that. I didn't even know what, like, the air true open source VC thing was at the time. And so that's... It's very different. [00:21:39] S2: I've I've felt like there's definitely room for like a 10 part podcast series. It was just teaching these people. If you're a complete outsider, what is venture capital, how to raise from it, what's a event, pitch deck, people to meet different VCs in that ecosystem. Yeah. No, for sure. Like, yeah, it was it was a
00:21:39 · Adam, Henry Innis, Sachin
[00:21:39] S2: I've I've felt like there's definitely room for like a 10 part podcast series. It was just teaching these people. If you're a complete outsider, what is venture capital, how to raise from it, what's a event, pitch deck, people to meet different VCs in that ecosystem. Yeah. No, for sure. Like, yeah, it was it was a [00:21:54] S0: big thing. Like, like, I distinctly remember this deck. Jethro, if you're listening, please feel free to post it publicly. It's funny. Detach it in the episode, It's really, really funny. I'll see if I can find it. It's the funniest pitch deck you'll ever see. Like, I look back on it as like a very laughable moment, but at the time it was a really big and confronting thing to go, oh, this deck is like no good. Like, yeah, it's it's trying to [00:22:17] S1: say is real. I've a question for you, Henry. Is this something that we're struggling at the moment where it's like, I think in the very early stage, obviously get as much feedback as possible, and you run a little of these experiments whether that's in product, whatever it is. But then there's also some of the best founders, like, you know, your Steve Jobs archetypes that have like a vision of the world and maybe people say no, it could initially, but then you like eventually get there. Like you almost build that vision of the world versus like listening to the customers and running lots
00:22:40 · Henry Innis
[00:22:40] S0: of experiments. How did you think about that in like Of course. I was always quite adamant that marketing should be planned on outcome, not input. So I just fundamentally believe that coming up through agencies. I thought that what, what was missing from the ecosystem in general, what was missing from, you know, how marketing budgets are allocated. Marketing budgets fundamentally, we all talk about it as media mix and market mix and, you know, what channels are we optimizing for? I've got a different word for it, capital allocation. Right? What we're trying to do is allocate capital to our most efficient bets for our best payoffs. And that's fundamentally what the job of a marketer is. No one frames it that way, but that is what marketing ultimately is. And I remember distinctly a conversation with Tim Doyle who basically laid it out that way to me, and I was like, oh, that's a really good way to explain it. And so ultimately in Mutinex, what, what I wanted to build was a capital allocation system. I knew the techniques that people were using to do it. I felt that a large model approach would kick an analyst's ass any day of the week. And so going down that approach of starting to build, how do we build a large scale model that's built in house, it's built by us, that's built to reflect and understand the dynamics of marketing rather than try to model a specific business was very, very important to getting right first. I have to say that I think we... Know, ChatGPT and Co did the world a favor by making it an easier concept to sell that, like, you should license a model rather than build your own. It kind of permeated that into the world's consciousness a bit. So that was helpful from an education perspective, but we just relentlessly work towards the user problem. Just like if if you think about what these problems are, enterprises spend millions of dollars to get one deck a year, one PowerPoint deck. Marketers who are optimizing spend constantly, optimizing capital constantly, they want insights live, real time. They want easy ingestion to it. They want all of these things done in a way that feels natural to them and sits within their workflow. You know, if you have a tool, you genuinely start to move them towards that and you unlock the capability of them. Right?
00:24:58 · Henry Innis, Sachin
You unlock a marketer to go from being okay, like I understand the data and I've got intuition, but I can't bring those two things together. Whereas I have a capital allocation system where I can plan out my kind of different scenarios. I can deploy my capital quickly. I can forecast. I can review tactical decisions. I can do all of these things and I can do it in one system rather than looking at 10. Yeah. And that's a very powerful thing. So I think by starting to work towards that, really, becomes a crux of how do we execute that well rather than changing the problem. So I think when I'm doing experimentation and stuff like that, I'm experimenting not on what the problem is, I'm experimenting on what the best execution to solve the problem was. And I think that's a big distinction that with that fundamental, like, [00:25:47] S1: almost belief that wasn't analytical necessarily, like in the micro that it's like, you've seen this problem, you know, the world should have this, you know, market should operate like... Correct. And then you experiment in the micro to solve that problem.
00:25:47 · Sachin, Henry Innis
[00:25:47] S1: almost belief that wasn't analytical necessarily, like in the micro that it's like, you've seen this problem, you know, the world should have this, you know, market should operate like... Correct. And then you experiment in the micro to solve that problem. [00:25:59] S0: Correct. I, and I think too many people think it's like either you're all in on lean startup or you're all in on the jobs paradigm. Yeah. I think it's actually a bit more nuanced than that. I think most great founders are very, very strong at understanding where the thing needs to be and what the problem they're solving is. And then they're very, very good at building teams that can iterate to execute against that quickly and basically generate feedback quickly to go, are we solving this in a really good way or not? There are some people who are just product savants, right? Who just have an intuitive sense of the customer that they're dealing with. You know, I wouldn't put myself in that category, but I've generally... Because I speak to customers so much, I've got a pretty good sense of it. And I
00:25:59 · Henry Innis, Sachin
[00:25:59] S0: Correct. I, and I think too many people think it's like either you're all in on lean startup or you're all in on the jobs paradigm. Yeah. I think it's actually a bit more nuanced than that. I think most great founders are very, very strong at understanding where the thing needs to be and what the problem they're solving is. And then they're very, very good at building teams that can iterate to execute against that quickly and basically generate feedback quickly to go, are we solving this in a really good way or not? There are some people who are just product savants, right? Who just have an intuitive sense of the customer that they're dealing with. You know, I wouldn't put myself in that category, but I've generally... Because I speak to customers so much, I've got a pretty good sense of it. And I [00:26:40] S1: think that's very important. Henry, when I first met you, something I came away thinking is that there's a lot of arrogance in the tech world because I think when you're young and in the tech world, you think that there's only smart people that exist inside the tech world, and you're kind of this outsider that just got up to speed so quickly. You're running one of fastest growing businesses in Australia. Curious to hear your take on this. Do you think like tech people have like an inflated sense of their own intelligence and self importance, there's actually just, you know, intelligent people evenly distributed across most industries?