The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:14:15 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:14:15] S0: When I listen to you, sounds fantastic. Yep. I'm also going, woah. Woah. Focus. Like, reader apps, communities. How would you advise founders on focus when it comes to product expansions? [00:14:26] S1: If I was to advise people, it would be choose your one ICP and build all the products around it to have them compound. However, that's not actually what we're doing. Instead, we're building discrete products, and the way we then tackle that is we basically shard the company. So we have a consumer app focused team, which has an entire growth team with a growth marketer, with paid ads, with community. We have created growth with their own paid ads, affiliates, and so forth. We have developer marketing, which is standalone. [00:14:56] S0: And so all of these sharded teams have their own growth elements to them? [00:14:59] S1: Yes. Yeah. Exactly. [00:15:00] S0: So there's not a horizontal growth team which sits on top of them?
00:15:00 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:15:00] S0: So there's not a horizontal growth team which sits on top of them? [00:15:03] S1: There is. So the structure we've set up is we have horizontal growth team, which are channel specialists. So we have a head of performance marketing who used to lead performance marketing for Shopify. We have a SEO expert who used to do most of this for Canva. We have, like, incredible individual specialists. But then within each team, we have a product growth lead who's responsible. They're basically CMO for their product, and they're thinking about all the metrics, the activation, the awareness, and then they have their own sub teams which are specialized just for them. Wow. Yeah. It's pretty funky. Our enterprise marketing team by the end of this year will be 20 people, and that's just for enterprise marketing. And then separately, our mobile app will be its own five to 10 person growth team. [00:15:47] S0: Wow. What was this like when you joined? And, like, if you were to advise founders on the scaling of that team and that structure
00:15:53 · Luke Harries
[00:15:53] S1: Yes. What what was it? Yeah. When I joined, we were three people, all very junior, very specialist. Hadn't actually done a growth role before, and this is the advice that I normally give. Start with one generalist growth marketer, and they should be responsible for everything from messaging and positioning, working with the founder, up to awareness and setting up channels and testing. The reason why you need them to do all of that is if you only hire a product marketer, great. Your positioning's lovely. Your messaging's lovely, but no one's heard of it. Or if you only hire someone who's very quantitative and channel focused, then they're only going to be focused on getting out there, but no one's actually gonna convert or resonate. So hire one generalist person, and the most important thing is that they really understand your product. And so this means if it's a technical product, they need to be technical. If it's a consumer product, they should really get the consumers and the virality. So it depends on the person. But start with a growth marketer. Normally, the second hire I recommend is a growth engineer who's front end leaning. And so this is like a software engineer who's hacky, who's running into metrics, and they should be setting up landing pages for SEO. They should be doing mini tools. They should be doing automated outreach. And then you can keep growing from there. Other great ones are like motion designers, back end focused growth engineers. What's that? Motion designers? Motion designers.
00:17:08 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:17:08] S0: I have not heard of this. Are we ring castrating Titanic? Like, why do we need motion designers? [00:17:13] S1: So video is hugely underrated as a medium for growth. And so every launch video we do, the keystone marketing piece we ship with it is the video. There's different types of videos you can do. You can do motion design, which is basically animated graphics. You could do a founder led video where they're speaking to the camera. You could do a more like screen share style video where they're kind of recording and interacting, and it's very product focused. But why I love motion design is it's abstract, so you can really focus on what are the core value props. You can make it catchy and attention focused and mix in the abstract UI elements. And the big mistake that I see with most people's videos is that they put the founder themselves. They do a full five minute monologue themselves about the company mission. And unless you have the editing skills of mister beast, you're just not going to keep people for the launch video. So make it sure, get the key message across in the first thirty seconds, and motion design is fantastic for this. [00:18:09] S0: Just digging because a lot of people will love that. Like, short is, like, thirty seconds, like, three minutes.
00:18:09 · Harry Stebbings, Luke Harries
[00:18:09] S0: Just digging because a lot of people will love that. Like, short is, like, thirty seconds, like, three minutes. [00:18:14] S1: The way I would do it is actually, like, nearly all your attention for your videos should be on the first thirty seconds. Very quick intro then get straight to the core value props. If you actually want to keep building out the video onto that to make it five minutes long, that's absolutely fine, but just recognize the majority of drop off will happen after that. So make sure you make that first thirty seconds truly incredible. [00:18:36] S0: You mentioned some different types there. We've got the motion design ones which are more animated. [00:18:40] S1: Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. [00:18:41] S0: And we've got the founder led kind of narrative. Any other types? [00:18:44] S1: So motion design, founder led, and screen share. Those are the three. [00:18:48] S0: What are the different use cases we would use them for? [00:18:51] S1: Any big launch, we lean towards motion design. You can get very complex products across quickly. The founder led one, personally, I think those are really risky because it can become quite egoful. To slightly call out Superhuman, they are an incredible... I know you're good friends with them. Truthfully, Superhuman are incredible at growth generally, but their most recent launch video is about five minutes. Very founder led. [00:19:15] S0: Did you not like the staircase? [00:19:16] S1: The staircase the staircase was beautiful, but, you know, you're watching Titanic scene.
00:19:16 · Luke Harries, Harry Stebbings
[00:19:16] S1: The staircase the staircase was beautiful, but, you know, you're watching Titanic scene. [00:19:21] S0: I was waiting for Rose to come. The staircase [00:19:25] S1: was beautiful, but you're watching Rahul walk down this beautiful staircase. And by the time he's walked to the bottom, kind of you've moved on. And so then in this, like, attention economy, you really need to make it short and snappy. I think that can work maybe if you have, like, a more boring product, like a consumer packaged goods or you're doing some sort of lifestyle or if you have, like, a prominent creator behind it already, fantastic. But in general, I'd be quite cautious of those. And then the third type is the more like screen share. And I think this really works well if you're selling to a technical audience who they basically want to nerd out on the details and the product itself and the craft, then those are great. They're very quick to make. Screen Studio is a fantastic piece of software to use for that. [00:20:08] S0: Fascinating. How do you think about using humor? Is there any world where quirky humor or is it actually like, no. No. No. This is a b to b sell or this is a professional tool. Yeah. Don't try and be funny.