How to build a powerful marketing machine | Emily Kramer (Asana, Carta, MKT1)

1. 0:00 – 6:08

   Emily’s background

   1. EKEmily Kramer0:00

      ... forget the product marketing, content marketing, partner demand gen growth. Like, forget all of it and just think of marketing as you need fuel and you need an engine. And fuel is, like, all the things that you're creating. I mean, this should be obvious, but it's the content, it's the words, it's the design in some regard. It's like all the things that you're making, all the things that are gonna add value. An engine is how you get it out to the right people and all of the tracking of that and sort of the ops work I put under engine. So you need fuel and you need an engine. And the question is, where do you have the biggest challenge right now or where do you think if you did more you would grow faster? Is it on the fuel side or is it on the engine side?

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky0:37

      Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard won experience building and scaling today's most successful products. Today my guest is Emily Kramer. Emily led and built the marketing teams at Asana, Carta, Ticketfly and Astro, which was a startup acquired by Slack. She was one of the first marketers to be hired at all four companies and has been instrumental in helping these companies build their marketing function, grow their products and build their brands. She also writes my favorite newsletter on marketing, MKT1, and the best compliment that I can give her is that she's a marketer that thinks like a product manager. In our chat, Emily shares a ton of concrete advice on what to look for in your first marketing hire, what the different archetypes of marketers are and who you should look for based on your business model, how to work with marketing effectively as a product team, and also what red flags to look for that tell you that your marketing team is not doing a great job. Emily is super specific and incredibly concrete with her advice, including sharing a ton of templates that you can immediately use that we link to in the show notes. I always learn a ton talking to Emily and I can't wait for you to hear this episode. And so with that, I bring you Emily Kramer. I'm excited to chat with my friend Jon Cutler from podcast sponsor Amplitude. Hey Jon.

   3. NANarrator2:01

      Hey Lenny. Excited to be here.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky2:03

      Jon, give us a behind the scenes at Amplitude. When most people think of Amplitude they think of product analytics, but now you're getting into experimentation and even just launched a CDP. What's the thought process there?

   5. NANarrator2:14

      Well, we've always thought of Amplitude as being about supporting the full product loop. Think collect data, inform bets, ship experiments and learn. That's the heart of growth to us. So the big aha was seeing how many customers were using Amplitude to analyze experiments, use segments for outreach and send data to other destinations. Experiment and CDP came out of listening to and observing our customers.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky2:35

      And supporting growth and learning has always been Amplitude's core focus, right?

   7. NANarrator2:39

      Yeah. So Amplitude tries to meet customers where they are. We just launched starter templates and have a great scholarship program for startups. There's never been a more important time for growth.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky2:48

      Absolutely agree. Thanks for joining us Jon, and head to amplitude.com to get started. Are you hiring? Or on the flip side, are you looking for a new opportunity? Well either way, check out lennysjobs.com/talent. If you're a hiring manager, you can sign up and get access to hundreds of hand-curated people who are open to new opportunities. Thousands of people apply to join this collective and I personally review and accept just about 10% of them. You won't find a better place to hire product managers and growth leaders. Join almost 100 other companies who are actively hiring through this collective. And if you're looking around for a new opportunity, actively or passively, join the collective. It's free, you can be anonymous and you can even hide yourself from specific companies. You can also leave any time and you'll only hear from companies that you want to hear from. Check out lennysjobs.com/talent. Emily, welcome to this podcast. I'm really excited to be chatting with you.

   9. EKEmily Kramer3:50

      Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to chatting with you in depth here.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky3:53

       So if I remember correctly, we first met in the first round angel track program maybe two years ago and then since then we've invested in a bunch of different companies together. I'm also just a big fan of your newsletter that we're gonna chat about. So just to set a little context for folks, can you just give us, like, a quick high level overview of your illustrious career and then also just plug your newsletter so folks can find it?

   11. EKEmily Kramer4:16

       For sure. So, the theme of my career has been building out marketing teams at B2B startups. So early in my career is in advertising, went to business school, but after that I started doing the startup thing when I was at Ticketfly as, like, the second marketer and then I went to Asana where I was the first marketer when they were about 30, 35 people and built up that team and led the team for just under four years. And then I went to a small seed funding company, helped them raise their A and eventually went to Carta which was about 300 people when I joined-ish give or take, but didn't have a marketing function at the time so built that function up from scratch, much like Asana, but at a very different stage in the company's life cycle. And then since then I've been advising and investing full-time and now have a small fund where we invest in early stage B2B and help them build out marketing. So yeah, building marketing, that's what I do.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky5:07

       I love it. Okay, so plug your fund and your newsletter real quick just so we can cover that.

   13. EKEmily Kramer5:12

       Oh yeah, sorry about that. My newsletter is M... The address mkt1.substack.com and my fund is Market One Capital. You can pretty much find most of these things on mkt1.co. Um, links to all the different various things that I'm doing so I can remember, um, 'cause there's lots of, lots of irons in the fire. So got to keep the website up-to-date so I don't lose track of all the things we have going on. There's also a job board and a bunch of other things. You have more things going on, but I have a number of these same sort of set of, set of things.

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky5:42

       Awesome. And we'll, we'll link to that in the show notes and everything. I don't think I've told you this, but many founders have mentioned you as one of their most helpful angel investors that they've had on their cap table. It just comes up often when we co-invest and the things that you-... help them most with, as far as I understand, is marketing advice, go to market advice, hiring marketing people. And so, I'd love to spend most of our time chatting through ca- basically the advice that you give founders

2. 6:08 – 11:26

   Hiring a marketing team

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky6:08

      around marketing. And the first area I wanted to dig into is hiring marketing people.

   2. EKEmily Kramer6:13

      Mm-hmm.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky6:13

      To non-marketing people, it's such a mystery of just, like, "What is a marketing person? What do I expect from them? How do I hire them? How do I find them? How do I interview them? What should I avoid?" So my first question is just, like, what mistakes have you seen founders and teams make when they're thinking about marketing and hiring marketing people?

   4. EKEmily Kramer6:33

      Yeah, and just to add to that, like, it's even hard for marketers to hire other marketers. (laughs)

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky6:37

      Mm-hmm.

   6. EKEmily Kramer6:37

      Like, it's even confusing for marketers to know where they fit in and, and, you know, if they haven't been hired yet, exactly what world they should be looking at or exactly who else they should be hiring on the team. So, while it's very confusing for founders and people who haven't, kind of, been in a larger marketing team to understand all the different functions, it's, like, also confusing for, for marketers. And I think that's just because there's so many different sub-functions of marketing and there's so many different things that marketers could do and there's such a range of being a deep specialist. Like, you have people that are just deep SEO specialists or deep paid search specialists or, you know, or, or writers and, like, they love to write and they write long-form content and, and that's definitely a part of what marketing does, but it's a specialty for sure. And then you have people that are just very much generalists and can handle all areas of marketing. And so a couple of mistakes that I see is just, like, hiring people that don't cover the area that you need most as a startup, and that kinda comes for two reasons. One is, like, you don't know, (laughs) as a founder or someone else doing the marketing and hiring for the first person, you don't know what you're gonna be doing in marketing. Like, you don't know what your big levers are gonna be, you don't know what's gonna work, and so you hire a marketer thinking, you know, they're, like, smart, they've done this before. But really, they haven't done the things that you need to do before. So, I see that especially with business model where I think having the right, the same business model experience is almost more important than having, like, industry experience or experience with that audience. And I think often people are like, "I need someone who's, you know, marketed to HR or marketed to, you know, construction," or, like, that specific. And my response is, "You, you're gonna really narrow your, your set (laughs) of people with that." And also, it doesn't matter as much because great marketers learn the audience and learn the product quickly and sometimes that fresh set of eyes is helpful and you have other experts in-house on the audience. But the business model really dictates what marketing does in a big way. And by business model, I mean more like, are you doing top-down sales? Are you selling to enterprise? Are you doing bottom-up product like growth or have a free version or whatever it is? Those types of things matter a lot because the set of marketing activities is just wildly, wildly different, which I'm sure we'll go into. So, to kind of summarize here, what I tell founders is I usually start, when I talk to founders, about who you need to hire in marketing 'cause usually the question is, "I think I need a marketer. Who do I hire?" I'm like, "Great question. Let's try to nail this down," because there isn't one answer. It, it very much depends. There's usually some common archetypes, but the first thing I say is that, like, "Forget all the sub-functions that you've heard about in marketing. Forget the product marketing, content marketing, partner, demand gen, growth. Like, forget all of it and just think of marketing as you need a fuel and you need an engine." And fuel is like all the things that you're creating. I mean, this should be obvious, but it's the content, it's the words, it's the design in some regard. It's the, all the things that you're making, all the things that are gonna add value. An engine is how you get it out to the right people and all of the tracking of that and sort of the ops work I put under engine. So you need fuel and you need an engine. And the question is, where do you have the biggest challenge right now or where do you think if you did more, you would grow faster? Is it on the fuel side or is it on the engine side? Typically, like if you just think about it logically, like you kind of need, you need the fuel first. And, and sometimes what I see is people just build an engine first and they're like, "Why isn't this working? We're sending so many outbound emails." And it's like, well, you don't have anything valuable to put in those. You have no fuel, so this isn't working. Or you see the flip side where they're making a whole bunch of things, they're writing a bunch of blog posts, they're making a bunch of content and they're like, "This content doesn't work." It's like, "Well, have you tried distributing it? Because if you're not distributing that and getting mileage out of it, it's a waste of time." So, this is a big problem in marketing overall, getting the balance of fuel and engine right, but I like to start from, like, what do you think is going to help most and what does- what skillset does your team not have? And typically if a team is, like, sales driven top-down, they might have, you know, an SDR at least an A or two at this time. Usually that comes first in top-down. And so the SDRs are kind of an engine. They're an imperfect engine, outbound shouldn't be the only thing you're doing, and if they're just reaching out and asking people to schedule meetings, it might not be that effective, but you have a little engine going on. So maybe now you need some fuel first. On the other side of it, if you're a product led growth or bottom-up, like, you might have a situation where just nothing's optimized. Like, your website's (laughs) conversion rates are terrible, people are dropping out of the funnel all over the place and you really need someone who can build up these, like, lifecycle email touches, work in product instead of... Work with a product growth person as well. And you really just, like, need more engine because people are already finding out about your product or it has some innate virality and you're just not capturing enough of that. So, I kind of, like, decode, you know, what's gonna help the most right now? And then ideally you get someone,

3. 11:26 – 16:00

   Examples of fuel and engine in marketing

   1. EKEmily Kramer11:26

      so we got fuel and engine first-

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky11:27

      Can I actually jump in real quick? 'Cause that's a really cool framework that I haven't heard before, this idea of fuel and engine from a marketing perspective.

   3. EKEmily Kramer11:34

      Yeah.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky11:34

      Can you get a little more concrete? What are, what are, like, uh, examples of, like, you know, it doesn't have to be exhaustive, but, like, when you think about all the things that fu- could be fuel and all the things... All the types of engines, what's- what are those lists?

   5. EKEmily Kramer11:47

      For sure. Yeah. I have a diagram of this stuff in my newsletter.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky11:50

      Awesome. We'll link to that.

   7. EKEmily Kramer11:51

      Yeah. So when I think about fuel and engine and what goes on either side, it's important to recognize that some things are fuel and engine, some things are fuel or engine and so- some things are both fuel and engine. Um, let me start with an example of something that's fuel and engine.... if done well, your community, like let's just take for instance, let's keep it simple, 'cause community means 75 things. Like you have a Slack community, that should be fuel and engine. You have people creating content in there that maybe you can then use in other areas, like you do this well. Like, you take, you know, what's going on in your community and you do, like, your community within parts of your newsletter. So you're using that as fuel, but it's also an engine because you have people in your audience that you're, you can distribute out content to. So there's some examples like that, but th- to, to go back to the question of what's fuel and what's en- engine, fuel is like the copy on your website, it's the blog posts that you have, it's the templates that you've created, it's the video recordings of the webinars or the podcasts. It's basically content, but also like to include some of the copy. And I think people have this limited view of content where they think blog posts and c- c-... Blog posts are one part of content. Like, content should be tools, resources, templates, like calculators. Those kinds of things do better in a lot of cases.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky13:04

      And like positioning, I imagine, is a, in that bucket?

   9. EKEmily Kramer13:06

      Positioning, yeah. Like, yeah. That's... Some of the product marketing stuff. So product marketing is this weird thing, and we'll talk about it, that sits kind of in the middle. But yes, product marketing, doing any positioning. Again, like the web copy which is sort of the first manifestation of your positioning and messaging, or it should be. It should be sort of the source of truth for all of that. But yeah, your positioning, your messaging, the words. The words and things you're creating, that's the fuel.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky13:28

       Awesome.

   11. EKEmily Kramer13:28

       Things that add value in that way. The engine side is what people tend to call, like, marketing growth or demand gen or things of that nature. That's really the distribution channels. The email copy itself is fuel, but how you've set up the email and the segmentation you've used and the rules for that drip email, like, that's the engine. You know, the SEO content's fuel, but, like, your SEO sort of, like, keyword list and the technical SEO and that kind of stuff is sort of engine. Social media, you got to have good fuel, but you also have to, like, nail it right, like exactly what channels you're using and all of that stuff. So a lot of things have both sides of it. So most projects or activities or initiatives have some fuel and some engine. I also consider marketing ops work, like the setup of, like, HubSpot or whatever it is you might be using. Like that's, that's engine. It's like, you know, really, like, constructing the engine, but I kind of put it in that bucket, 'cause people who are usually good at executing on email or executing on ads or things like that usually have some working knowledge of the ops work and the reporting work, 'cause you have to, to be optimizing. I guess ads and page is also, also engine.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky14:34

       Awesome. Okay. And so, kind of coming back to your original piece of advice here is you want to, before hiring a marketing person, you want to figure out which of these buckets is the biggest constraint to your growth, right?

   13. EKEmily Kramer14:44

       Exactly.

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky14:45

       You talked about this briefly, but is there any, like, simple heuristics to give you a sense of, like, "It's probably fuel. I need more great content, maybe some website updates," versus like, "I need to figure out how to get this out." Is there... Like, how do you think about that high level?

   15. EKEmily Kramer14:58

       Yeah. I mean, it's kind of simple. Like, you can just ask, you know, "What are your top performing pieces of content?" Or, "What's the top performing page on your website?" Or things of that nature. "Who is your product for? Why is it better? What are the benefits? How does it compare to competitors?" If you don't have an answer for those questions, you don't have top performing content and you don't know sort of your p- positioning and all that stuff, like you got a fuel problem here. "Oh, you wrote this really great piece of content and I saw it on your website. How are you distributing that? What are you doing?" And they're like, "Oh, I shared it on social, but it didn't really go anywhere." Like, you got an engine problem. Or if I say, "Do you know what your final stages are? You have two salespeople now. How does the marketing to sales handoff go?" And they're like, "Oh, they like share a list in Slack of everyone they should reach out to." I'm like, "Well, we know you have engine problems. This isn't going to scale." So it's just these basic things, like are you doing these things, or, or not? And, you know, sometimes founders are really great at making the original sort of content and writing the early positioning and they're the best suited to that, and they just need someone to help them get that stuff out, and that's when they need an engine person. So yeah, so, so that's like basically how you figure it out. And

4. 16:00 – 18:20

   What is a product marketer?

   1. EKEmily Kramer16:00

      normally when you ask founders that question, they, like, get it pretty quickly. They're like, "Okay, I think this is my problem. Like, I can kind of identify it." And then it's like, okay, from here, well, what exactly do you need and what exact type of marketer do you need? And that's where everyone's answer is always like, "I think I heard from investors or I've been hearing from other founders that I really need a product marketer." And the question is, "Well, what do you think a product marketer is?" And you get a different answer every time. In fact, when I was at Asana, our, our COO, Lenny, his question that he liked to ask all the marketers, or all the product marketers that we were interviewing was just, "What's product marketing?" And that's the scariest question you can ask a product marketer. Like, (laughs) there's, like, no scarier question for a product marketer than, "Hey, what's a product marketer?" They're like, "Oh shit, I have no idea. It's just, it's my job. I, it's me. I'm a product marketer." But really, like a product marketer, they understand the product, they understand the audience, and they understand the market in which you're operating. And from there, they can figure out how to communicate with your audience about the right things at the right time, so they're kind of like laying groundwork. And then they're also doing some work too. They're also doing a lot of, like, the copywriting and the actual messaging and handling sort of launches and sometimes writing, writing copy for things like emails and helping set the content strategy and things like that. And people think they need product marketers, one, because it's like a thing people say, but two, because product marketers tend to shadow this line between fuel and engine. They're more, more on the fuel side, but particularly if they've done a lot of launches in the past, they have a general understanding of sort of channel strategy and what channels to use at what times and that sort of engine stuff. But product marketers aren't really specialists in writing and producing content. They're not specialists in building out marketing ops or doing SEO. They're, they're definitely more of the generalist function. And, and so sometimes that's a great answer, you need a product marketer, but sometimes you need someone that's scrappier in different, in different areas. Another one of my frameworks is we start with doing your fuel and engine, like what are the biggest problems? What are the biggest things that if you did, you would drive growth? And then we talk about sort of the three typical sub-functions that you would hire, which would be content, community, comms type person, a growth, demand gen type person-... and a product marketer, and we kind of talk about what those two, three things mean and kind of align, based on what you're saying, it's going to be, based on the fuel and

5. 18:20 – 20:30

   Why you should start with a marketing generalist

   1. EKEmily Kramer18:20

      engine thing, probably need this type of person. And then, from there, what I tell people is when you're hiring your first marketer, and probably even your first several marketers, you more want to hire a generalist than specialist. This is probably true for anywhere at an early stage startup, but specialists are great to hire. It's great to hire contractors that are specialists, like the FPO contractor, even the, the contractor who can write, like the, you know, the marketing ops contractor. But you want someone who's pretty much a generalist, and the way I describe that within marketing is, usually you hear, "Oh, like hire a T-shaped person that spikes in one area and has, like, working knowledge and breadth across all of them." But I use this thing that I made up, which is you want to hire pi-shaped marketers. Not pie like a dessert, but pi like 3.14, where the-

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky19:08

      Hmm.

   3. EKEmily Kramer19:08

      ... pi symbol has, has two vertical lines. So like a T, but it has an extra line. And it's because you want the first marketer to be an expert in one of those three areas that I mentioned, product marketing, content marketing, growth marketing, and you want them to be proficient in another one, the second T. You want them to be able to set strategy and know how to hire contractors across all of them. And so the promised land of hiring a first marketer is they're, they're a pi-shaped marketer, and so then you could hire a content and product marketing pi-shaped marketer or a product marketing growth pi-shaped marketer. But it's like, what are those two spikes, and what's the one that you're going to worry less about that they need a working knowledge of? The last thing I'll say on the pi piece is that really hard to find someone that's a content marketer that's also really good at growth. Like, that pi-shaped marketer exists a lot less frequently. Maybe it's someone who's, like, really amazing at content distribution, or, like, really amazing at FPO, but they don't really exist, because the content side is, like very... It's like one side of the brain and the, the growth data stuff is like a whole other side of the brain, and it just, you don't find those people very often. So yeah, you're usually looking for that product marketing, growth marketing pi-shaped person, or the product marketing, content marketing pi-shaped person.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky20:21

      Wow. Okay. This is great. So I was gonna ask you about-

   5. EKEmily Kramer20:25

      Sorry, this is a- this is dense. This is a lot of marketing window, so hopefully we're, hopefully we're breaking it, breaking it down.

6. 20:30 – 23:57

   The difference between a growth person and a product person

   1. EKEmily Kramer20:30

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky20:30

      Yeah. No, we're getting there. So let me try to kind of summarize and see, see where we go. So I was gonna ask you about kind of the archetypes of marketing people, and sounds like there's these three, is the way you think about it. There's basically a content community person, there's a growth person, and then there's product marketing, which is kind of, like in the middle.

   3. EKEmily Kramer20:46

      Mm-hmm.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky20:47

      And I guess one question I wanted to ask is, there's also just, like the growth function, product growth, p- growth PMs-

   5. EKEmily Kramer20:54

      Yeah.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky20:54

      ... things like that. Do you see that as, as the same thing as this growth marketing person? Or is that a different type of person in a different role?

   7. EKEmily Kramer21:01

      In top-down sales businesses, it is 100% different. A growth person is typically probably called a demand gen person. There's a whole other, you know, rabbit hole we could go down on what's the difference between growth marketing and demand gen. And demand gen's probably more top of funnel and growth marketing is probably more full funnel at its simplest form, but it's definitely different there. In a product-led growth business, the growth marketer and the product growth sort of role, or the hybrid growth role, sometimes it can be the same person depending on the skillset, but typically the difference would be that the growth marketer has more, is doing more of the top of funnel sort of inbound side, and the product growth person is doing more, like once they actually get into the product, but can be collaborating with that, that growth marketer. So it can be the same person, an extremely data-driven sort of person that kind of has a working knowledge of both marketing and product stuff. It can be one person in those, uh, you know, early stage PLG companies. But I think typically, and I'm sure you've seen this, like, you know, at larger companies, as growth teams get bigger, you're going to have some people that come from more of that marketing perspective, and you're going to have some people that come from more of that product perspective. But the question is like, is there ever one person that does that?

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky22:09

      Okay, so to make this a little more concrete, even for startups, thinking from a startup perspective, when you're just-

   9. EKEmily Kramer22:15

      Mm-hmm.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky22:15

       ... thinking about hiring your first, say, marketing person, when you think about this, like s- m- set of buckets that you talked about, there's-

   11. EKEmily Kramer22:23

       Mm-hmm.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky22:24

       ... content marketing, growth marketing, product marketing, plus to your point, there's at larger companies, or maybe later stages, like separate from a growth PM type person.

   13. EKEmily Kramer22:33

       Mm-hmm.

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky22:33

       What do you generally think is the right role to hire, slash archetype to focus on? Or is it really dependent, like you said, on fuel versus engine versus something else?

   15. EKEmily Kramer22:45

       I mean, it's highly dependent on, again, like the business model, what you need more of, what you already have in place, what's going on. But the most common archetype that I say you want to hire is, is, is (laughs) a product marketer, even though I joke that everyone's like, "Says they need a product marketer."

   16. LRLenny Rachitsky22:59

       (laughs)

   17. EKEmily Kramer22:59

       But it's actually understanding what that is first, that understands growth marketing as well. So they probably worked somewhere early on where they've had to have some exposure to that, so they understand all the channels they're working with, they understand what they can do with those channels. And maybe they need to work with contractors on some of those things. And it's just because product marketers usually... Also, that product marketer needs to know how to write. Like all marketers should have some working knowledge in writing, but they need to know how to write. They need, they are the copywriter for a long time. Like test that they can write, make sure that they can write both short form and long form. They're not going to be necessarily as good at writing as, say, a content person, but like, they need to be able to write. And yeah, product marketers just tend to have that ability to write and that ability to understand what channels they can use to reach their audience. So they, they're in the middle. So often that's the case, but I mean, sometimes I find that I'm, that I'm recommending hiring that growth person first, because they maybe already have a couple of really great contractors and they have a couple of really great pieces of content that can just be like gifts that keep on giving if they keep distributing them and repurposing

7. 23:57 – 26:58

   What to look for in a product marketer

   1. EKEmily Kramer23:57

      them.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky23:58

      What do you look for in this product marketing person? You mentioned ability to write is really important. What else? When someone's like scanning LinkedIn or just like later talking to them, what do you find is important to focus on and look for?

   3. EKEmily Kramer24:10

      This is gonna be hard to find, but I think I want to see that they've worked-... on a team that's early enough where they are not siloed into their specific role. Because what happens at later stage companies or at public companies, is when you're a product marketer, like, you don't see what's going on in the rest of marketing at all. Like, you have a very siloed view of it. Maybe you're, like, only working on product launches as a product marketer, which is not ... You know, the positioning is already set. The audience research already done. Like, they haven't done any of those things. Or, like, the channels are all built out. Like, you know, it's just different, right? And I think that's the case in a lot of, in a lot of roles at startups but, like, you know, building it from scratch is different. So it doesn't mean that if you're a Series A company hiring your first marketer that you need to hire someone that's worked at a Series A company, but it usually means you're hiring someone that's work- worked at least at, like, a growth stage company where they have exposure to a bunch of areas of marketing. Also, looking for have they seen what great looks like. So whether that's they joined a startup early and it did really well, or whether that's they had a stint at a later stage company and then, you know, early, earliest in their career they were at a big company and then they went to something smaller. Like, do they know what high quality sort of great looks like? It doesn't always have to be, like, you don't always have to have been at a, a, a startup that everyone thinks of as, like, "Oh, they're really great at marketing." But it is helpful and there are some people that just have a really high quality bar and really understand what great marketing looks like, even if they haven't worked at those companies. But I like to say, like, has worked somewhere early enough that they could set strategy across all of marketing and do they know what great looks like? That's something I'm scanning for. I'm also scanning for, like, for your first marketer, like, you don't want to go out, I see this mistake all the time, like, you don't want to go out and hire someone super senior who's, like, only worked at a public company. Like, that's this is wrong person. And often VCs or, you know, sort of lead investors that aren't in a certain niche, like, they're gonna, they're gonna when they refer candidates to startups, like, usually the fail I see is they're like, "Here's someone great from Google." And I'm like, "I'm sure they're great, but they're not great for this role." And that's the mistake I see all the time. "Oh, we just fired our first marketer. They ..." I'm like, "Where did they work?" They're like, "Oh, they only worked at Salesforce." I'm like, "Well, d- yeah."

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky26:15

      Why is that not a good fit?

   5. EKEmily Kramer26:16

      Just 'cause they can't, they don't understand how all the marketing works together and they don't understand how to build the foundation. It's much different marketing something that already everybody knows what it is or everybody knows the brand even if they don't know the product and they have a built-in customer base than building something up from scrat- from scratch. It's just a very different marketing, marketing motion. And you need to do a lot of thing, like, you need to do a lot of things yourself. You need to be a doer. So you're really looking for, you know, like, most roles or most, mm, you know, lead of function roles at startups, like, they need to be both strategic and sort of scrappy enough to get the work done. Like, you're gonna be doing it all. And in marketing, like, you're gonna be, you're often gonna be the first marketer for a little while, um, and you're gonna be doing everything. And so there has to be some sign that you're gonna be comfortable with that.

8. 26:58 – 30:45

   When to hire a marketing person

   1. EKEmily Kramer26:59

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky26:59

      Awesome. When do you find that it's usually best to hire your first marketing person?

   3. EKEmily Kramer27:05

      I mean, stage wise, you know, you're looking at, like ... So most people are doing it in c- at seed depending on their business. But usually it's at Series A or you hire one sort of more junior person at seed or when you're coming in to raising your Series A and then, you know, you have two people right after your Series A. But really it's, like, I think it's helpful to have some sort of semblance of product market fit. Like, maybe it's not, you're not 100% sure but maybe you have definitely some successful customers. It's not like, you know, we're working with a design partner to build this out and we have a, you know, we have a couple pilots. It's like marketing is really good at accelerating growth and sort of doing things at scale, sort of like one-to-many. So if you're still in the very, like, bespoke, like, founder led sales, founder led marketing, like, "I'm doing discovery with each of these potential customers and, like, you know, have to modify my product for them," like that kind of thing, like, you don't need one yet. Like, you can do, founders can do a fair amount of stuff and they can use some contractors. I think you need them earlier in product growth models, because you're not going to hire a salesperson then. So it's, it's more like thinking about go-to-market holistically and saying, like, you know, "Do I need one or two people here and what is that?" And so if you're a top-down model sort of enterprise sale, you're probably going to have a couple of salespeople before you hire marketing. But that might not be the case in sort of these more self-serve product-led growth models, you just don't need the salesperson. So having the marketer is helpful. So again, like, the business model affects this a lot. But usually, like, the general rule of thumb is, like, if you had a marketer what, what would they do? And, like, you know, I often help people try to figure that out. What would they do and would they ... You know, if they stepped on the gas and did all the stuff really well, would you be able to handle all those people that came in? Is it even a good time to bring all those people in, t- to your product? So if they, like, you know, are they gonna be held back by where your product is or where some of the discovery on exact business model is or things like that? And, like, if that's the case, it's just, like, not a good use of money when they're kind of just, like, sitting on their hands, like, "I can't spend any money on paid and I, like, don't have, you know, e- ther- we don't even have any idea what to say on the website 'cause we're selling four different things." Like, it, just, it's kind of hard to hire someone in that case. (instrumental music plays)

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky29:19

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9. 30:45 – 33:24

   The role of a brand marketer

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky30:45

      nutritional insurance. Just to set context, most of your experience is B2B, so I guess j- we should just let people know this is probably mostly B2B-

   2. EKEmily Kramer30:52

      Yes.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky30:52

      ... startup advice.

   4. EKEmily Kramer30:52

      Sorry. Mo- Yes, mostly B2B advice. I think a lot of this holds. Like, I think the fuel engine stuff holds for B2C. I think the roles pretty much hold, but you might hear the word brand marketing thrown out a lot more in, in B2C, and that's more gonna be talking about, like, the fuel stuff and, and maybe that's gonna be what they hire before they hire, say, like, a product marketer, but it's kind of the same set of functions. But yeah, most of my experience is B2B and, and most of the startups I work with are B2B. But some-

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky31:18

      Cool.

   6. EKEmily Kramer31:18

      ... some of it holds.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky31:19

      Yeah, I was gonna ask about brand marketing. That's, like, another bucket, right? We didn't, haven't talked about that as a type of skill, or does that fall into one of these that you were talking about?

   8. EKEmily Kramer31:27

      To me, brand marketing is a combination or has some of the s- some of the work that happens in, by a product marketer and by a content and community marketer. But maybe they also are more influential on the design side of things. And so brand marketing is another one that means, like, 75 different things. Sometimes it means, like, you literally manage des- designers or you're, like, a creative producer, and sometimes it means you're more doing work on, like, what are the stories that we're trying to tell and you're doing more of the content stuff. And sometimes it means I'm doing the positioning work. Sometimes it means I'm, like, working on sort of, like, you know, the website or, like, branded paid stuff and, like, consumer. So it means a lot of things too. But usually the person that in B2B, the person that kind of owns the brand is, is the positioning story side of brand is owned by product marketing, and the design side of brand is either just sort of, like, owned by the product designer at first or, like, working with a brand designer or if the marketer has the skill set there could be owned by them as well. So it's a little murky at first, but eventually, like, uh, i- i- in on B2B teams when I've run teams past, you know, like, 10, 15 people, I'll have a brand person that is working really closely with the designers and kind of, like, making sure, sure that everything that we're producing on sort of, like, the content side of things is up to the, the... Th- they're acting as sort of an editor there. They're making sure everything, like, ladders up to the overall story. So they're helping tell the story, they're helping make sure the design is right. And, like, you know, in some instances they'll have a brand person that's kind of working on these larger brand initiatives. Like, we did a huge data study when I was at Carta, and the person that kind of ran that whole initiative and the events and it was sort of, like, a separate initiative that had a lot of different parts with my brand marketer. They were kind of working on these larger sort of big bet projects that span across

10. 33:24 – 36:22

    Marketing for PLG startups

    1. EKEmily Kramer33:24

       all of marketing.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky33:25

       Awesome. Well, you talked about the growth PM role kind of a- adjacent to all this. For the typical, say, PLG startup, in your experience do you find folks h- should hire, like, more of a marketing person than a growth person that focuses on, say, conversion or, yeah, optimiz- optimizing the funnel or SEO or paid or anything like that? What's your, what's your experience there?

    3. EKEmily Kramer33:47

       For PLG, I think you want to have a marketer that is responsible for getting into the pro- people into the product. That's a marketing profile. That's using all these channels, that's driving inbound, that's focused on web conversion, uh, making sure your website converts. Like, that's a marketing skill set because it's really, like, who you have to work with to get this done is really how I think about it. And, like, you have to work with the people that own the website, which is marketing for all of the sort of inbound stuff. You're gonna work with other people on the marketing team. So that piece is really a marketing piece. The product experiments and the product tests, that's the person with a product skill set because they know how to work with other PMs and they know how to work with engineers and marketers don't. And then there's these gray areas like the onboarding experience or, like, when you first get into the product, and that is, like, an area where there needs to be, like, a ton of collaboration. So my view is, is that, like, if you're going to have a growth PM, it's probably helpful for them to have PM experience or product experience. But they should be paired as soon as they can be with someone that also understands sort of that top of funnel piece. Or maybe that person isn't in a full-time growth role, but know who on the marketing team is going to work with them on these areas of crossover, like, you know, like onboarding or that first use experience and making sure that, like, the sign-up flow from, like, filling out something on the website to getting in the product is really consistent. Because that area of, like, I'll call it, like, a handoff. We talk about, like, the marketing to sales handoff all the time on the go-to-market side, but there's a marketing to product handoff, and that's the handoff that's really important in PLG. And if that feels weird to, to a user, like, it's two different teams inside of a company, but if that often... But if that feels weird to a user, like, you're gonna notice that that all of a sudden feels extremely disjoint. Or if I'm getting a bunch of product transactional emails while I'm ge- getting a bunch of marketing drip emails. So that handoff or that experience needs to be ironed out or, like, consistent or there needs to be tons of collaboration there. So however that is done, I don't really care what the team look like. Lots of different companies have different versions of how they do this. But the idea is, is that experience needs to feel consistent and you need to have collaboration across people that have those skill sets and you need to have, like, a clear process for how that looks. And so it's just like getting that marketing to sales handoff right in my opinion. It's like how do you get the marketing to product handoff right? And if, if it means you have someone that owns onboarding that's in a hybrid role, then great. If it means there's, like, a committee sort of situation with one person at the DRI, that's great too. So I think my answer is...I don't think there's one way to structure it, it's highly dependent on the company overall and I think you need both skillsets.

11. 36:22 – 39:23

    What is product-led growth?

    1. EKEmily Kramer36:22

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky36:22

       You touched on an area of tension that often comes up between marketing-

    3. EKEmily Kramer36:27

       Yeah.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky36:27

       ... and product. I imagine many listeners hear you saying, "Oh, marketing should own the website and conversion and, and op- and net flow." And thinking about the idea of product led growth, like the idea there is product will grow our business and oftentimes PMs do that work and oftentimes they're really good at it. And so I guess the question is, in your experience, do you find that it should be marketing more than product or product people? Is it, like, depending on the person, like maybe they're called the product person but they actually are really good at marketing? Any insights there?

    5. EKEmily Kramer37:05

       Yeah.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky37:05

       And then we can talk about just the collaboration between the two functions.

    7. EKEmily Kramer37:07

       Yeah. So I think that product led growth is a misnomer. I think people will do anything they can possibly do to not call marketing, marketing. I think we always see this. And so I think that product led growth really means not as much sales, which means product plus marketing. And so that's probably a hot take, but product led growth is just another name for what we, like ... I mean, it's a l- product led growth is a little different than, like, premium or self-service or these things. But it, it's not ... You are being handheld by the product, you aren't being handheld by the sales team. So really to me, like, it's ... And you can have a sales assist with product led growth as well, but typically what's more at odds in my mind is, like, product led growth means you are gonna have a huge sales team early on. It doesn't mean you're not gonna have a huge marketing team early on. In fact, to me it means you are gonna have a bigger marketing team early on because you're not gonna have those sales. Sales is not communicating with customers. So I think it comes back to, like, what are these teams typically good at? And marketing is typically good at the communication piece of one too many. That's what they're good at. And so they are usually good, uh, they should be good at figuring out all the channels, top of funnel, to communicate peop- with people. And product is really using product as a channel by which to communicate with customers, pro- prospects, et cetera. So that's, like, one way of sort of thinking about the difference. On conversion, you know, conversion also means lots of different things. There's, like, top of funnel conversion, getting on the website and, like, filling out some other form. There's, like, you know, conversion once you're in the product, becoming an active user or inviting people. So it's like, well which part of conversion? Web conversion I typically think of something that's owned by marketing because usually product doesn't wanna own the website. Like, I rarely ... Early on, product will sometimes own the website because marketing wasn't there, but the website is something that's gonna need to be updated, like, 5,000 times and it needs to be on, like, Webflow preferably at this point, or a CMS that's easy to update. And if it's, like, built into the code base, that's, like, a ... Or it's on a headless CMS or it's not touchable by marketing, that's a huge problem. When it comes to once they click the sign up button, who should be mostly involved in that process? I think, again, there needs to be ... I, I think there's lots of ways to handle that, and I think if it's product that kind of has that skillset and the testing skillset and there's enough volume that you can be doing a bunch of tests, like, maybe that's the person that owns that.

12. 39:23 – 43:38

    How to get product and marketing to collaborate

    1. EKEmily Kramer39:23

       But I think there's still gonna be a lot of collaboration on the exact words that are used and things like that. So I think it's just, like, whatever it is, make it clear where the handoff is. And so maybe it's not, like, marketing owns the entire website because maybe they don't own those flows, but, like, there's this gray area. And I think the other big thing is sometimes the forms, like the literal forms that are used, are built in your website and sometimes they're built in the product. And I think that also drives a lot of it because it's who do you need to help you build these things? And if they're built into the product, then, like, the product team needs to own that. But I don't think it should be ... It shouldn't be, to me, like this ... Like, let's not argue about it, let's just, like, we're trying to move this, we're trying ... And here's the things that marketing's gonna do and here's the things that product's gonna do and here are the areas of overlap. But, like, I don't think product should be in the business of, like, owning the whole website and all the top of funnel messaging and all of th- that stuff. Like, that's just ... It's not the best use of anyone's time, really.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky40:18

       I know you had a lot of success with marketing and product working together at Asana and kind of double clicking on the same thread, what have you seen-

    3. EKEmily Kramer40:27

       Yeah.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky40:27

       ... to be an important part of this collaboration and kind of making the best, making one plus one equal three when product and marketing are working together at a B2B company?

    5. EKEmily Kramer40:36

       Yeah, and look, like, there were definitely ups and downs working p- marketing working with product at Asana as well, but I think overall we did a good job because of some of the systems that Asana had in place, which is, and we talked about this before, but something that Asana did well is they had this list in Asana, of course. Everything at Asana was in Asana, through Asana, by Asana.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky40:58

       (laughs)

    7. EKEmily Kramer40:58

       But, uh, we had a list of areas of responsibility, which is just who owns what. It's not your job title, it's what are the things that you are the DRI for. It doesn't mean that you're not gonna collaborate with people on those things, but what are you the directly responsible individual for? And this made it really easy to know who to go to. Like, the directly responsibil- the directly ... I'm just gonna use DRI 'cause I can't keep saying directly responsible individual.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky41:20

       Mm-hmm.

    9. EKEmily Kramer41:21

       So the DRI on tests on the onboarding experience is Jennifer, the PM, but the copywriter for that is, I don't know, I'm trying to, who- think of exactly who the person was, is Devon on marketing, right? Like, so we broke it down that simply so you knew who to go to because often what happens with product is they're like, "I'm doing a launch. I don't know, there's ..." Especially when there's, like, 15 markers, "I don't know who I'm supposed to go to this, for this product launch or to, like, figure out if this is a launchable feature, so I'm just gonna, like, skip it." So it's really helpful to say, like, the product marketer owner for, you know, this part of the product is this and to just have this list. So just having clear ownership is what this comes down to, but it's one thing to have clear ownership, but it's, like, quite another to, for other teams to know, like, who that clear owner is. So I think having a clear list beyond titles and just, like, who owns what is really helpful. And then as you hire new people, you can break down those ... You know, the list kind of gets longer 'cause you're gonna break things down more. You know, it goes from Emily owning all of marketing to me, like, breaking that down and, and not owning all of it. So I found that really helpful-I also found, at Asana we did something called roadmap week, which was before every quarter, where we had sort of open meetings. Some- sometimes they were open and sometimes they weren't, but we had cross functional meetings to help plan for what you were gonna do that quarter on your team. So like, I could sit in on the product roadmapping for X as the head of marketing, and that was really helpful to just like get a sense for what was going on. And sometimes there'd be people in those that were like silent participators, and then like a document would be made so you could see this. And this, this, I mean, it doesn't scale forever, but it worked really well early on for people being able to be looped in on things, to have these sort of out loud planning meetings where you were talking through like, "Here are our biggest decisions. Here's what we're, like, wrestling between and getting input," kind of knowing what was going on. I think another thing that we did well was also like kind of having clear review processes. And all of this sounds like a lot of process, but like once you actually make an AORs list, it kind of like runs itself. Like someone new gets hired, they're excited to put in their AORs, or someone gets a new responsibility and they're like stoked to like take it over from the head of, head of marketing or whatever it is. Like, "I finally have h- handed you like the master managing editor AOR," and it becomes like a, you

13. 43:38 – 47:58

    What is the GACC framework?

    1. EKEmily Kramer43:38

       know, a big deal. The other thing that I think we did well from a marketing perspective is another newsletter that I have, is this framework that I use called the GACCS, or the G-A-C-C-S, which... GACCS is- sounds more fun to say than the G-A-C-C-S, but...

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky43:53

       Yeah. Sounds better.

    3. EKEmily Kramer43:53

       This is just a- (laughs) yeah. This is just a, a marketing brief that, that I recommend you do before you make anything in- make anything big in marketing or do any big projects, and it's just, what are the goals? What's the audience? What's the creative or unique angle? Or like, what's the like oomph with this thing, I guess? Uh, what's gonna make it different and stand out from other companies, I guess? The second C is the channels or how this is gonna be distributed, how are you gonna get the word out about this, deep thinking there. And then the last piece are the stakeholders, like who's the DRI and who needs to weigh in and who's gonna be the helper and who are the contributors? And that's where you can include some product people. And you can share this before you start doing any work. So for instance, if you're doing a product launch, product manager communicates with the marketing team, maybe you have a meeting, maybe you share some brief from the product side or you share sort of what's being built, and then marketing comes back to you with the GACCS and you can kind of weigh in on, "Oh, here are the channels they're gonna be using." Like the, you know, the creative C has maybe the highest level of messaging. And you get buy-in early on and then you can like go much faster. And then you're not just like sharing with product, like, "Here's a blog post that I wrote for the launch." And they're like, "What? This is the wrong audience, the wrong thing." Like you just save so much time sharing these types of things upfront. So I find like there's a handful of different practices that need to be in place, but it's like sharing the right information at the right level of information at the right times and having a culture of doing that. And it needs to go both ways. Like product needs to loop marketing on a like, "Hey, here, here's what I'm, you know, here's what we're working on this quarter. Here are gonna be some of the things that we're launching. Are any of these interesting that you wanna like, you know, double down on and sort of do a public launch for?" Or whatever it is. Or, "Hey, like we really think onboarding needs to be improved. Let's put together like a group that's gonna work on this this quarter and like let's kind of have like a sprint plan that's cross functional." It's, it's a lot of that. So it, a lot of this happens in a planning process. So if you as a company don't have a good planning process, like, you're not gonna have good cross functional collaboration, especially between product and marketing. And I think the last thing is just like a respect for the skill set. Like recognizing like you're good at this or like you had- you have access to engineers, you know how to get them to do things. Like I don't wanna do that as a marketer. Like, you know, I'm good at storytelling and I know, you know, how to get people in the door and in the, in the funnel, and let's like respect what each person is good at and let them go do their thing. So those are just like some of the, you know, tactical practices and things that we did at Asana that I thought worked well. But it's, it's hard. I mean everyone, you know, everyone wants the other team to be doing something a little bit differently, and that's always gonna be the case. And those tensions in some cases are good 'cause that's why you have the benefit of having different teams and different perspectives. But it gets out of hand when people are just working in silos and aren't communicating with each other and aren't looping people in on things that they're experts on.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky46:43

       Awesome.

    5. EKEmily Kramer46:44

       Yeah.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky46:45

       All the, uh, templates and frameworks that you mentioned we're gonna link to in the show notes. One of the things I love about you is you, you almost, you're like a PM minded marketer where you make everything super concrete and templated and-

    7. EKEmily Kramer46:57

       Yeah.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky46:58

       ... and, (laughs) and assigned.

    9. EKEmily Kramer46:59

       I like a framework. I like a framework.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky47:01

        Yeah.

    11. EKEmily Kramer47:01

        And I like a template and yeah, I am pretty PM minded, like 'cause I, I'm pretty well rounded when it comes to the marketing skill set. Like I don't really consider myself a growth marketer or a product marketer or a content marketer. I just consider myself a marketer who builds teams and that's like, yeah, that's, it's a different, different mindset. And I also love, I love goals and planning. Like not, no, I don't love like annual planning processes that companies do and like overdone OKR exercises where you're making like this crazy cascade that then nobody can follow. But like basic sort of simple planning so that you, you know, kind of go a little slower up fron- front so then you can just like fly on getting things out the door. Like that's, that's the kind of teams I like to lead.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky47:44

        Awesome.

    13. EKEmily Kramer47:44

        Just like upfront buy-in and then like move fast and do what you need to do.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky47:48

        I love the sound of that. We're-

    15. EKEmily Kramer47:50

        Don't we all?

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky47:50

        We're also working on a guest post that may come out before this, uh, comes out or after, around a lot of these templates. So I'm excited-

    17. EKEmily Kramer47:57

        Yeah.

    18. LRLenny Rachitsky47:57

        ... to get that out the door.

14. 47:58 – 54:33

    How to know if your marketing team is effective

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky47:59

       Coming back to this, this kind of tension that often happens between PMs and marketing people, tell me if you agree, but I find that product teams are always, are often very, uh, skeptical of marketing and find that there's just like all this time, energy, resources put into marketing efforts and in, and it's hard to measure, who knows what's happening there, while the product continues to evolve, you can tell what it's doing, it's often driving most of the growth.And so my main question here is, as a product person, what tells you that the marketing person and team is good and awesome and you should trust them, and they know what they're doing, versus like, "Okay, maybe they're not amazing and we should kind of try to push back?" Any advice there?

    2. EKEmily Kramer48:45

       Yeah. I recently did a, a talk with my friend Jenny, who was the head of content at Asana and now is the head of content and comms at Clearbit, and (laughs) she was sort of joking. We were, like, coming up the na- for the name of the talk, and she was like, "I wanna caute- call it 'Content Splattery versus Content Strategy.'"

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky49:02

       (laughs)

    4. EKEmily Kramer49:02

       And I was like, "Well, we'll, we'll work that in, but we don't... You know, maybe that won't be the title 'cause s- splattery is a really weird word."

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky49:09

       Mm-hmm.

    6. EKEmily Kramer49:09

       But it's true, a lot of m- I... Uh, but I think it's funny because a lot of what marketing is, is it splattery and not strategy, meaning it's just, like, you just throw a bunch of stuff out there. And you're doing a bunch of work, and it, it's, like, a lot of busy work and you wanna look busy, but it's not impact focused. The best marketing teams are, like, impact focused. They can tell you, of all the things they're doing, what are the core things that are sort of driving that linear growth or just, like, keeping the lights on? They can tell you what their big bets are, like, "What are the things that we are doing right now that we believe can cause step cha- step change top-of-funnel growth?" Or step change growth on signups or whatever it might be. What are those things? What are the big bets that you're taking, and then what are the foundational sort of pieces of marketing that aren't done yet, like, that might be taking up time? Like, "We, we would love to be able to move faster here, but we're, like, we don't have a good, uh, lead scoring system," or, like, "We're wor- we're working on this." Like, "We need to redo our website, and here's why. We need to, like, get it into Webflow and then we'll be able to move faster." So they should be able to break down, like, you know, "Here are the core things we have to do. We're measuring, we're measuring that, like, the core work is working by these KPIs, and it's sort of a full-funnel view, and we are working on these big bets, and, like, here's the foundational things that are broken." So if you ask a marketing lead and you're like, "What are their big bets?" And they're like, "I don't know." Like, you can't grow at the rate a venture-backed startup should grow by just, like, continuing to do incremental things. Like, that's the same in product, I wanna mention as well. So, like, they need to have this sort of framework going on, and the other thing that I think is a sign that you're not being impact focused or you're not being effective as a marketing team is you have... This is, like, my favorite thing to pick on, and I see it all the time, and I understand why it happens but, like, don't do it. It's like, "Our goal is to write 10 blog, blog posts this month," and I'm like, "No, that's, that's not a goal." Like, that's maybe a tactic, but, like, the goal should be traffic or s- and the conversion rate from that traffic, or the signups that come from that. So it's not... You shouldn't have activity goals, you should have impact goals. And so the best marketing teams are focused on these funnel metrics. They're not just focused on a certain number, like signups or qualified leads. They're focused on that number plus maintaining or improving the conversion rate that comes after it. So they're focused on signups with a conversion rate to activated user of the same or better than it is now. Because I can get a lot more people to sign up for a product, but, like, they might be really shitty quality, so you need to have sort of that other threshold. So these are some of the things that I look at to say, "Is the marketing team impact focused?" And when I talk to companies or work with marketers and look at, you know, what are they doing and what are their projects like, these are the things I usually point out. Like, "You need to, you need to be more impact focused, and here's what you need to do." Um, so that's, like, sort of the, the big thing. It's like, are they doing a bunch of busy work, or are they doing a bunch of things that could actually lead to tangible growth, and what metrics are they using to track that? The other thing is, like, if they're not tracking, to my point about not just looking at the raw numbers at each stage of the funnel, but looking at the conversion rates. If they're not looking at conversion anywhere at all, there's a huge problem. Because again, I can throw a bunch of people into a funnel stage, but if they c- don't convert to the next one, it might not be helping anything. So, their focus on conversion, not just at the stages of the funnel that they own, but throughout the entire funnel, I think also is a good indicator, um, if they're being successful as marketers or not.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky52:32

       I feel like everything you're-

    8. EKEmily Kramer52:33

       Just some things.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky52:33

       Yeah, these are great. I feel like everything you're saying is music to every PM's ears. That, that great marketing people should be impact focused, have clear goals and KPIs. You also talked about how it's important to DRIs, like who's responsible for what and being really clear about that, communicating really clearly and often, and then there's this piece about just setting the foundations, like, a strong foundation that helps make all these other things successful.

    10. EKEmily Kramer52:57

        Yeah.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky52:57

        This is great. I imagine every PM would be like, "This is, this is exactly what I want from my marketing team." And your point here is, if your marketing team and lead is not doing these things well, maybe there's an issue-

    12. EKEmily Kramer53:08

        Yeah.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky53:08

        ... and maybe it's not the right marketing person.

    14. EKEmily Kramer53:09

        Yeah.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky53:10

        Awesome.

    16. EKEmily Kramer53:10

        And look, if it's not the team lead, because sometimes you do have, especially at larger companies, you have a team lead that's either, like, on the... You could have someone that's extremely sort of creative and sort of on, on the brand side of things, but they need to have, you know, someone that's working with them that is really good at all of this stuff. Like, there's a big sort of... It's almost like when you need a marketing PM, then those tend to be the product marketers. Or the, or the lead. 'Cause there's so many different projects going on, and lots of different things happening, and it's hard to put it all together and say, "What are we doing as a marketing team that's moving the needle?" But I think the other thing about, like, communicating often is also, like, communicating at the right level. I find that marketers, even though they're often good at communicating with the audience, they're not good at communicating internally, and I think I've struggled here too as I move to, like, leading larger teams and being on executive teams. It's just, like, what level of information do you need to communicate and you need to educate people about what marketing does, 'cause one, marketing often has a bad reputation, and so you need to be like, "Here's what we're actually doing and moving." And two, like, there's a lot of jargon in marketing and, like, you gotta separate that out and, like, communicate the right level of information at the right time. So, I think that's hard too, and so that's why I like things like the GACS framework and, and other things like that of, like, what exactly am I communicating about and at what level. It's, it's hard to get right there too.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky54:25

        Amazing. One last question before we get to our very exciting lightning round.You've been-

    18. EKEmily Kramer54:29

        I can't wait.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky54:30

        (laughs)

    20. EKEmily Kramer54:31

        (laughs)

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky54:31

        You've been waiting all week.

15. 54:33 – 1:00:23

    Why founders need angel investors with functional expertise

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky54:33

       Um-

    2. EKEmily Kramer54:34

       (laughs)

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky54:35

       So you mentioned that you've bec- you're a full-time investor basically at this point, and the newsletter is a part of that.

    4. EKEmily Kramer54:39

       Yeah.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky54:39

       You've become a really active angel investor, and it's really cool to have seen the way you've turned your experience in this really smart way of getting into great deals and supporting founders. And so I'm curious if you have any advice for folks that are thinking about becoming angel investors in the future, just like how to leverage their expertise to become successful in investing?

    6. EKEmily Kramer55:00

       Yeah. I think there's a, um, big need for investors that have functional expertise. In traditional, traditional VCs, they don't necessarily ... Maybe they founded companies, maybe they've always been investors or, you know, sometimes VCs ... come from like sales roles or PM, PM roles. But for me and for marketing and maybe for some of the roles that other people are in, like there's not a lot of investors or even advisors from that function, and they need help there. And so I think more and more, um, founders are seeing instead of having advisors or even hiring, you know, someone in that function early, it's like, "Let me lean on angel investors for that." And so, you know, I make it very clear when I talk to founders, "This is how I'm gonna help." Like, "I'm going to help you build your marketing function. I'm definitely gonna help you hire. I'm gonna help you shape the job description, the process. I'm probably gonna refer you some candidates. I might even refer the candidate that you hire," which has happened a bunch of times. And then I'm gonna work with that person to make sure that they're setting the right strategy and doing the right things. And so being that clear on like, "Here's my exact value add," is incredibly helpful. And I mean, we get into every deal that we want to. We being, I have a business partner named Kathleen that I do all this with, and we can get into any deal, which I think, um, as like an early angel investor, I'm like, "Why are people saying it's hard to get into deals? Like, I don't have this problem." And that's not me like tapping myself on the shoulder. It's just showing there's huge shortage h- here. So your skill set might be really valuable to founders. And even if you feel like, "Oh, I don't understand how like everything works at a company," or, you know, things like that, like your, your skill set could be really valuable and they might not see it. It's also when you have a unique skill set and a unique way that you help that's well, uh, well articulated, like, "We're gonna help you build marketing," it's like easy to understand, it makes it easier for other people to bring you into deals versus, "Here's another generalist investor that's just gonna like help." So it's almost like you got to like product market yourself, like, what's the product that you're offering? And then it's so easy, like, you know, Lenny, to like bring me into deals where they might need some marketing help and there's tons of investors that do that, which gets us the deal flow that we need. So yeah, I just think if you have, if you have a niche or you have an area where you're particularly skilled, you can really leverage, leverage that into being a sought after angel. Now, if that makes you a good investor, I'm not sure. There's lots of other things you need to get up to speed on to actually be a good investor. But from the standpoint of like helping founders and getting into deals, that can be, that can be really helpful.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky57:19

       Awesome. And the other part is you actually have to deliver because then people-

    8. EKEmily Kramer57:23

       Yeah. (laughs)

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky57:23

       ... share more deals with you. And as I said earlier-

    10. EKEmily Kramer57:26

        Yes.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky57:26

        ... I've heard so often how helpful you've been to founders, and so that's an important element.

    12. EKEmily Kramer57:31

        Yeah. Y- you definitely have to deliver. And again, I think that's where it's like really helpful to say where you're going to deliver. So they're not necessarily expecting you to deliver on every little thing. Like, they're expecting me to help them hire their marketer, hire contractors in marketing, fill in gaps until they have the marketing team that they need, and so they know when to come to you and then you respond. Um, yeah, I think that's also like when people have full-time jobs, I think it's hard to be able to do that, full-time jobs that aren't this. It's hard to be able to just like tap in and do this kind of stuff. So it's like, don't go overboard because your reputation really, really matters and that's how we've always seen it. Like, we wanna be the most helpful angel investors, or now we have a small fund, but the helpful sort of, most helpful investors that you have in your cap table regardless, like not just within marketing, but within everything. And we do that because we can go really deep on an area and we're always responsible in those areas. And yeah, it's good to hear it's working 'cause that's what we're trying to do, is be really, really helpful. And the other thing too, the last thing I'll say on that is like, you know, each founder probably thinks, maybe they don't, that it takes us a lot more time than it actually does to be helpful in that area. Like, I have the same conversations over and over again about how to hire a marketer. Like, you can do it in my sleep. So like me having that conversation with you and like dropping knowledge that you haven't heard, like it's, it's, this is what I do all day, but it feels really new because they don't have a lot of people talking to them about marketing. We just have a bunch of candidates that we talk to and our newsletter generates candi- candidates that we talk to. So like anyone can go on our website and get on our list of candidates that we're referring. I talk to one or two candidates a week from that to just meet more marketers. So like I have, you know, a, a, a list of marketers I can refer, and so it's really easy when founders ask me for referrals. So it starts to scale pretty well if you have that niche where you help.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky59:16

        Yeah. I was actually gonna add that, that, um, it may sound scary to be, feel like you commit to all these startups as an investor, you have to help founders all day. I can say I've invested in over 150 companies at this point, which on the surface could feel overwhelming. Like, "Holy shit, how do you ... all these founders are probably asking you for advice all the time." But I find it's not that, that most founders just like, "Leave me alone. I'm good." Or maybe once a quarter, "Here's an, here's something I could really use help with." But it's, it, it's not as much time as you think. And when it is-

    14. EKEmily Kramer59:47

        Yeah.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky59:48

        ... it's, it's really powerful, but it's not like a overwhelming amount of time commitment.

    16. EKEmily Kramer59:53

        The other thing there too is if you refer someone that a company hires, they're gonna love you forever. Like, (laughs) they remember that because you sit there and you look at them. I mean, you're may- maybe not anymore looking at them in an office, but you, you know, you see or are aware of them every day and you remember, "Oh, they came from this person." So like one of the most valuable things you could do is refer candidates. And so, you know, that's where I think you can add a ton of leverage just referring the right people. So if you have a network and a bunch of people that you know in a certain area, like that's an area where you can really

16. 1:00:23 – 1:07:02

    Lightning round

    1. EKEmily Kramer1:00:23

       do, do a lot of good for a startup.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:25

       Absolutely. Speaking of doing good, we've reached our exciting lightning round. (laughs)

    3. EKEmily Kramer1:00:31

       Oh, great.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:32

       So I'm just gonna ask you five questions real quick. Whatever comes to mind, let me know. First question-What are two or three books that you've recommended most to people?

    5. EKEmily Kramer1:00:41

       I kinda like the, the classic marketing books. Maybe because I think that they're not a classic, and they're, like, recency based. Like, marketing changes so fast, um, like most things in, in, in startups and technology. It changes so fast that, you know, some of the ... I, I like the things that have stood the test of time, and those are things like The Tipping Point and, like, Crossing the Chasm, and I like Seth Godin's Purple Cow, which is just like having something that makes you stand out. So, those are like the classic marketing books that I think every marketer, or some of them, should have read at some point. I think April Dunford's Obviously Awesome is sort of becoming one of those books that every marketer should have read on positioning. It's really helpful, even if you're not, like, a product marketer doing positioning, I think it's really helpful. And then the book I read most recently is not related to marketing at all. I read, uh, it was my partner's favorite book, and, and she was always like, "I don't think you're gonna like this bo- ... I, I don't think you'll like it," but it's her favorite book, and it's All the Light, All the Light We Cannot See, or You Cannot See o- about World War Ch- ... World War II, which is sort of a depressing topic, giving all of the tumultuousness in the world, but I thought it was just a very beautifully written book, and when you read a lot of business writing a lot, it's kinda nice to step back and just read, like, really beautiful prose on, like, a really heavy topic that isn't just, like, startup marketing. So, it was kinda fun to go back and read sort of a older book that was really beautifully written. Next one, Lenny.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:58

       Next question, okay. (laughs) What's a favorite podcast of Liz?

    7. EKEmily Kramer1:02:00

       Let's get off books.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:01

       Yeah, yeah.

    9. EKEmily Kramer1:02:01

       Uh, besides yours, obviously.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:04

        Obviously.

    11. EKEmily Kramer1:02:04

        Um, no, I mean, you're doing a great job for someone who's just started out doing podcasts, like-

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:08

        Thank you.

    13. EKEmily Kramer1:02:09

        ... you go deep with people, which I think is good. It's not just the surface-level stuff.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:11

        Yep.

    15. EKEmily Kramer1:02:12

        Um, look, like, the podcast I listen to most is, like, every night when I go to sleep I listen to The Daily, uh, New- The New York Times Daily, like, just gets me, you know, to know what's going on. I also like some true crime podcasts, but I won't talk about that 'cause maybe that's a little embarrassing and basic. And I think for, like, just kind of getting, understanding founders and startups, like, over the years, I've found, like, How I Built This to be really helpful, and, like, I think the main thing I've learned from, like, How I Built This is that most startups are really messy, and so, like, if you feel like (laughs) if you, at the beginning, and like, if you feel like, "Oh, like, Wisp is a mess, like, we're doing everything wrong," like, that's kinda common, so it's, like, helpful in that regard too. It's like, it's not just me. But I think there's really interesting, you know, founder stories, and hearing how things are built is always helpful, so those are some that I like.

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:55

        Favorite recent movie or TV show?

    17. EKEmily Kramer1:02:57

        My favorite TV show from this y- this year was Yellowjackets on Showtime, which is kinda like Lord of the Flies, which a bun- bunch of women, like Lord of the Flies meets Lost. It's really good. So, it has, like, Christina Ricci in it, like, the person who was in, like, Casper and Now and Then if you were, like, a girl that grew up in the late '80s and '90s, you'll know who the Christina Ri- Ricci is.

    18. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:18

        Absolutely.

    19. EKEmily Kramer1:03:18

        But yeah, uh, Yellow- or, or a guy, or a guy, any gender. But yeah, I really liked Yellowjackets. I think it's great, and it was, like, the first show in a while that I've been watching it where I, like, for the first couple of episodes, like, I wasn't on my phone half the time, so that's, like, my measure for is it good. And then the best movie I've seen recently was we watched, um, CODA, which is ... I think it won some, like, Oscars or something.

    20. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:39

        I think it won Best Picture, uh, and, and-

    21. EKEmily Kramer1:03:41

        Oh, okay-

    22. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:41

        ... Ap- Apple made it.

    23. EKEmily Kramer1:03:41

        ... so it won, like, the Oscar.

    24. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:42

        Yeah.

    25. EKEmily Kramer1:03:43

        So yeah. I'm really original in my picks here. I'm p- like, "Oh, I just watched the Oscar Best Picture. I thought it was great." No, but CODA was, like, I think I cried, or at least I almost cried.

    26. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:52

        No, I cried.

    27. EKEmily Kramer1:03:52

        I don't think I ever cry in movies. Yeah.

    28. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:53

        I, I actually cried, yes.

    29. EKEmily Kramer1:03:55

        It's, yeah, it's about a family who, like, a, a non-hearing, like a, a family who can't hear and then, uh, uh, uh ... the, their daughter can hear, and they become really interested in music, and, like, it's the story of a family, and they're, like, a family of fishermen in Massachusetts, which my brother is a clammer in Massachusetts as his job.

    30. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:13

        Whoa.

Episode duration: 1:10:53