Leveraging growth advisors, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta)

1. 0:00 – 3:31

   Luc’s background

   1. LLLuc Levesque0:00

      We talk about the 10X engineer, and we don't really talk about the, the 10X growth, uh, advisor or 10X growth person, but the same dynamic applies. You could argue it applies even more, because the right growth advisor can have literally company-changing impact. Something I've experienced several times in hindsight when you're like, okay, here's the needle in the haystack, and then it's implemented, and you can see h- hundreds of percentages, sometimes over 1,000% lift when you get it right. It's one of those weird disciplines where the right person at the right time can literally say a sentence that changes the trajectory of your company, and you can't say that for a lot of different disciplines, but this is one of them.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky0:35

      (instrumental music) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Luke Levesque. Luke is currently the chief growth officer at Shopify. Before this, he was recruited personally by Mark Zuckerberg to help grow Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. He's also VP of Growth and a GM at TripAdvisor. He's also been a growth advisor to companies like Twitter, Pinterest, Patreon, Thumbtack, and Canva. And in our conversation, Luke shares advice on how and when to think about getting a growth advisor, including how to structure the relationship and what to look for in an advisor. We also spent a ton of time on SEO, how to think about this as a growth channel, who it's well-suited for, and how everything is about to change in SEO with Bard and ChatGPT. Plus, Luke shares a ton of really interesting advice around the value of self-reflection, building routines, cold plunges, also a couple of amazing stories about working with Zuck and what he learned from him. This is such an insight-rich episode, and I know you will love it. With that, I bring you Luke Levesque after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Mixpanel. Get deep insights into what your users are doing at every stage of the funnel at a fair price that scales as you grow. Mixpanel gives you quick answers about your users from awareness, to acquisition, through retention. And by capturing website activity, ad data, and multi-touch attribution right in Mixpanel, you can improve every aspect of the full user funnel. Powered by first-party behavioral data instead of third-party cookies, Mixpanel is built to be more powerful and easier to use than Google Analytics. Explore plans for teams of every size and see what Mixpanel can do for you at mixpanel.com/friends/lenny. And while you're at it, they're also hiring, so check it out at mixpanel.com/friends/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Attio, a new type of CRM that's powerful, flexible, and built around your data. Traditional CRMs were built for a different era, with totally different speed, scale, and data demands. Attio is different. It allows you to quickly build a CRM that matches your unique workflows and data structures. Within minutes of connecting your email and calendar, you'll have a CRM that's already set up, complete with customer profiles and automatic data enrichment. You'll also have real-time dynamic reporting at your fingertips. No more slow deployments, outdated user experiences, or tedious manual data input. With Attio, you can build and adapt your CRM on the fly no matter your business model or company stage. Attio is the CRM for fast-growing startups. Get started today and get 15% off your first year at attio.com/lenny. That's A-T-T-I-o.com/lenny.

2. 3:31 – 7:09

   Luc’s first MT review at Facebook

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky3:31

      Luke, welcome to the podcast.

   2. LLLuc Levesque3:34

      Thank you. Good to see you.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky3:36

      It's good to see you, too. I want to start with a story that you shared once when we were hanging out in the past, and something that I'll never forget. And it's, uh, about the time that you'd just joined Facebook, and apparently you had some kind of big presentation you had to give to the entire company or the executive staff, and then I just love the way it- it kind of unfolded and kind of sh- gives you a glimpse into what it's like to work with Zuck and at Facebook. Can you share that story, if that rings a bell?

   4. LLLuc Levesque4:00

      If I remember the story well, basically, I had just started at, uh, Facebook and Meta. I'll use those two interchangeably. I remember it as, as Facebook. Uh, and always will. And I was three months in and was, uh, working on a new area forming. So came in, started putting together our thoughts on a, on a strategy, and was asked to do a presentation in front of the company with Mark, uh, on the strategy. So I, you know, whipped up a draft strategy, put together some plots, some plans, presented it in front of the company, went well. And then every six months, there is something called the MT Review at Facebook, and you basically... you know, product area leads will go in and present their strategy, how it's going. Again, I had just joined three months before, so I walk in, no idea what to expect. I am sitting at a table. You can kind of envision, it's a big room, really big room, with a bunch of tables set up in a big square, with a little microphone. So I sit in there, there's Mark and all the executives sitting on the other side. And I sit down and it's quiet for what felt like five minutes. I'm sure it was not, but it, uh, was quiet for a while, just sitting there waiting for, you know, what- what- what's gonna happen now? And at some point Mark kind of looks over, says, "Hey, we- we saw your presentation, saw your strategy. Now when are we gonna start seeing results?" And that was my introduction to Facebook. It was kind of my introduction to working with Mark, and, uh, was a pretty kind of intense thing to go through. Again, I'd just joined. The strategy was very much a draft at that point. But I think what it highlights is something that Facebook does really, really well, which you get very quickly when you join Facebook, and it's why they're such a- an execution machine and can build a lot of great product. It's because they focus exclusively on that magic word, which is impact. And that was kind of my, my first introduction to working, uh, with Mark and, uh, just that laser focus on, "All right, got it. Now when are we gonna start seeing impact?" And kind of moving from there. So, it's something that is very much in the culture there and something that is so important. It's something, of course, that- that we focus on a lot,... at, uh, at Shopify, but it's that difference between, "I don't care how hard you've worked, I don't care what you're working on, what the activities are, what are the outcomes? What is the impact you're having?" And I actually really love that word impact and, and focusing in on it, because it's vague enough that it covers off any work that is impactful towards the mission, and it's precise enough to know, you know, w- what does that mean when you say, "Are you having an impact?" Or, "What is the impact we're having?" So it's a great way to approach things. That was my, my first experience there within a few months, and, uh, yeah, and, uh, we jumped in and started focusing on having a lot of impact from there.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky6:37

      I love that story. There's a couple of things there. One is, uh, if I were in your shoes, I'd, I'd poop my pants sitting there for five minutes waiting for... (laughs) What are you guys...

   6. LLLuc Levesque6:45

      That did not happen. I've had to report...

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky6:47

      Okay. (laughs) How did it go? How did you deal with it? Or I guess, how did you respond?

   8. LLLuc Levesque6:51

      Well we, funny enough, already started having impact, so I was able to at least, uh, respond with, "Hey, we, we've kind of already started in a few ways." And walked through where we were having impact, and just focus on, uh, the strategy, what our, our plans forward were, and where we wanted to go from there. So that's, that's, I think that's how we responded but-

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky7:08

      Okay, great.

3. 7:09 – 9:20

   Impact vs. industriousness

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky7:09

      (laughs) Great work.

   2. LLLuc Levesque7:10

      ... yeah.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky7:10

      So something I've started doing actually on this podcast is, I've started to keep a little Post-it of... Here it is, uh, of like themes that continue to recur across companies that are most successful.

   4. LLLuc Levesque7:20

      Yeah.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky7:20

      And impact comes... It's like number one on my Post-it here, is just like impact comes up so often as something that the best companies continue to come back to and focus on, and put a lot of emphasis on. I-

   6. LLLuc Levesque7:32

      Yeah.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky7:32

      I guess I don't know what the question is exactly, but is that just what you find in the work that you do with all the companies you work with, just how important it is to come back to impact as the, maybe the primary thing?

   8. LLLuc Levesque7:42

      Yeah, I mean, I think it's easy for a lot of leaders and, and companies to get caught up in how hard are people working, what did they do, and recognizing and rewarding activity. Uh, I mean, everybody wants to have impact, and the companies that truly focus on that are the ones that break through and, and, uh, really make a lot of progress towards their mission. So that seems obvious, I think, when I say it out loud, but being in that culture, and having it really ingrained in everything you do, and whether it's performance reviews or, you know, strategies or these reviews with the executive team, it all gravitates around impact. And I think it's that laser focus on it that matters so much. But I mean, I've certainly seen it go in other ways where it's more about, you know, working long hours. And certainly there's a correlation, to be clear, between working hard (laughs) and, uh, and impact, but I find it's just such a precise way to think about how people are performing or what you're doing in terms of is your strategy working, is your, the direction you're moving in having the, uh, intended outcomes that you want? And, uh, yeah, I do think it's, it's all about that. And being a growth leader, where everything is so measurable, impact is something that can be very clearly measured and you know whether you have it or not. So the most important thing that we work on constantly is reviewing what's our strategy, what are we working on? Is that driving towards the top level North Star outcome we want? Is that having the impact? And then basically doing everything around that, that singular North Star. So, so it's very, very important and, um, I think it's more profound than, uh, it might seem just from the outside. But if, you know, if you've worked in different companies, you've pr- probably experienced different versions of this too.

4. 9:20 – 13:12

   Facebook’s relentless, personalized approach to recruiting talent

   1. LLLuc Levesque9:20

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky9:20

      Yeah. I want to spend more time on this, but before we move on, you also have another Zuck story. And correct me if I'm wrong, but Zuck recruited you personally to join Facebook/Meta. Uh, is that true? And then if true, what was that, what was that like to be recruited by Zuck so personally?

   3. LLLuc Levesque9:35

      It was an interesting experience, very, uh, intense, but also, uh, one of the reasons for it was I was living in Canada and my family was there, and I had some strong personal reasons why I couldn't leave Canada. But yeah, we had a lot of discussions with Mark. I won't get into the micro details of it. That's more Mark's story to tell than, than mine. But a few takeaways from going through that experience as a leader, hiring is the most important thing, as we, as we all know. It's, it's a craft and a skill that I'm always working on refining. I have my own playbook that I'm constantly tweaking, testing out different approaches, trying to find the best talent and, uh, assessing them and, and trying to close them and bringing them on board. So I learned a lot through that experience with Mark. And a couple things that stood out were... The first one would be that, you know, Mark really involved the entire executive team. It wasn't just me talking to recruiting or talent or HR or just Mark. It was the entire executive team, and that's something that I think a lot of leaders don't take advantage of. I've seen leaders... I've, I've certainly done this at times where you go it alone or you're working with recruiting, but the reality is all the leaders, all the execs in the company know how important it is to bring in talent, and they're always more than happy to help. So that's something that I think more leaders should do, is really recruit all of their peers and their leaders in the company to help close, and that's certainly something that happened when I was in discussions with, with Mark and Facebook about joining. The second one, which I had I suppose never experienced before, was that they made it very personal. I had these reasons why I couldn't leave, so initially I was, I was excited by the opportunity, but I couldn't see myself moving to California for personal reasons. And through discussions, Mark basically in- involved my wife, involved my, my spouse in this, Andrea, and we flew down, had dinner with him and Priscilla, his wife, and Andrea had ended up meeting with many of the executives at Facebook and really talking through what was holding us back, why we couldn't come, potential options and ideas for how we could come down. But involving somebody's spouse and family I think is a really good idea, because it's a very personal decision to change company. It involves more than just that person you're talking to, it involves their whole family. So that was something that I think is an important thing to have in, in your kind of playbook for hiring, is really think about the whole person's family and involve them if you can. In fact, Tobi did this as well at Shopify. He flew down here with Fiona for... And we had breakfast with, with Andrea and them and reviewed a few offers when I, when I joined Shopify.And then the, the third thing is just to be absolutely relentless and don't give up and don't let momentum drop. It took seven months for me to go from there's, you know, this is amazing, exciting, but there's no way I can make this work, to, okay, let's move to Palo Alto. And, you know, Mark, the execs, uh, a variety of leaders there were in discussions for months and months and months, and never letting the momentum die. And that's something that I think is really important. No doesn't necessarily mean no, and in this case, it definitely wasn't the case. And I had the same experience with Tobi at Shopify, where we've been talking about working together for over 10 years now, and then finally the timing was right and, uh, I was able to join the company. So just be relentless, involve the family, involve the, the spouse if you can, and recruit some, some help from other executives in the company. Those are some of the things that stood out and through my experience. But yeah, it was a, it was a, a pretty wild time in my life.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky13:00

      Relentless is actually another word I wasn't necessarily exposed to yet, but I feel like it's another trend across the most impactful and successful founders, is just this like, I will not give up. I will keep at it.

   5. LLLuc Levesque13:10

      Definitely.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky13:10

      And so that's a really interesting example of that

5. 13:12 – 16:56

   Luc’s hiring playbook

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky13:12

      in action. I was gonna talk about this later, but maybe it's a good time to talk about it now, which is, uh, around hiring. So you talked about you have this playbook for how to hire.

   2. LLLuc Levesque13:20

      Yeah.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky13:20

      And you mentioned to me that you kind of find that as you scale as a leader, hiring ends up being like the most important skill maybe, maybe one of the most important skills.

   4. LLLuc Levesque13:28

      Yeah.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky13:28

      I'd love to hear your take on just what you found about hiring as you've grown as a product leader.

   6. LLLuc Levesque13:33

      Well, I think you reach a point in your career where you realize that hiring is the skill you now need to become world class at because you're no l- no longer doing the work yourself. You're still, of course, involved and, and doing some of the work and getting your hands dirty, but the bulk of your team's success now will be the quality of the hires you make, and you truly need to be world class at that. So yeah, I built this, this playbook out. I was in Canada, in, in Ottawa when I, uh, I sold that company to TripAdvisor and really started growing my team and becoming more of a, a... you know, leaning into leadership at the time, uh, through that experience. And one of the benefits of being in Ottawa and kind of off the grid, if you will, is it's a curse and a benefit, is that you don't have a ton of people you can learn from, so it does mean you need to go to first principles and think things through from the ground up. It takes a little longer, but you come up with your own playbooks on how to do things. And yeah, I think you've seen my pl- my blueprint, which is a good example of that, where I have this, this blueprint put together, and when new people join the team, I show them my blueprint, which is basically a list of my quirks so we can really quickly align. That's something that just being in Ottawa and trying to figure out how to be a leader and avoid mistakes, I was like, "Wouldn't it be nice if we had a blueprint?" When somebody joins, you can just tell them all of your quirks and you can just quickly calibrate on how it is to work together versus through awkward long discussions over the course of a year. Uh, my hiring playbook's a similar thing. So I think of it in three different chapters, if you will. There's finding talent, assessing talent, and closing talent. In terms of finding talent, I do believe that the best predictor of future performance is past performance, so I'm looking for s- what I call signs of excellence. So I want to know, you know, the top people generally have done multiple amazing things in their life, repeated success, not just once, maybe it was work-related, maybe not work-related, but generally speaking, if you think back to the stars you've worked with, they've done some amazing things, and that's why I always start, when I interview or when I chat with people, I start talking about just trying to understand what, what has been your path, what have you done professionally and, and not professionally? And, uh, generally stars kind of stand out. It's very, uh, rare that there's not something obvious that comes through. So I, for myself personally, I'm looking for kind of three different signs of excellence to tell me that. Doesn't have to be three. The j- the mental model I have is there's, as you're talking to them, you're getting pluses and negatives, there's red flags you're hearing, and there's really great things, and then at the end, you can make an opinion of how good this person is. Another great sign of excellence, and this was just through reflecting on my team and, uh, stars on the team and thinking, "What makes them unique? What about them?" And one of them is when somebody's boss leaves the company and then comes back to poach them, that is such a strong signal. Because if you think of what just happened, the person left, the- the leader who knows exactly how good this, this person you're talking to is, they have the most knowledge of the performance of this individual, they left the company, they've come back to poach them, putting their own reputation at risk by coming back depending on the situation, and you know, they would never do that unless this person was really, really good. So it's, you know, you don't want to over pivot on one signal. You wanna look at the full picture. But those are the types of things I look at, uh, to bring in top talent. And I've got this, this whole playbook, mistakes I've made, uh, that I've learned from, things to avoid, and, uh, over the years I've, yeah, I've put together this playbook that I, I try to follow, and I'm always running little experiments to try to make it better.

6. 16:56 – 18:04

   When to focus on growth and the importance of product-market fit

   1. LLLuc Levesque16:56

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky16:56

      We're gonna link to that blueprint that you mentioned. A lot of what you're talking about is probably more relevant to like senior executive type people because you're looking for... Or maybe not 'cause you're looking for say these three-

   3. LLLuc Levesque17:06

      I think so. Yeah.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky17:06

      Okay, so people like early in their career could also have three, say, moments of excellence.

   5. LLLuc Levesque17:12

      Yeah, I mean, just, just thinking off top, it depends on the type of person you're hiring, but have they, you know, had they s- are they a founder? Have they tried to do something? Did they win an award somewhere? Are they a, you know, gold medalist at something? Have they done something that others have not that, that shows grit, that shows drive, that shows the ability to succeed? And, and I've seen the, that you can apply that to any candidate you're hiring.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky17:36

      And the implication there is without that, they're probably not gonna be stars, that, that's, there's a strong correlation between having signs of excellence and them performing really well in this role.

   7. LLLuc Levesque17:45

      Correct. Exactly. Yeah, it would be-

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky17:47

      Awesome.

   9. LLLuc Levesque17:47

      ... I mean, I suppose it's possible, but it would be pretty rare that somebody would come in without some sign that they stand above the crowd. And again, I'm talking about you generally want to hire the top 1% of candidates, so when you're looking for the best of the best, you definitely are looking for those, those signals.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky18:01

       Awesome. Okay. So I'm gonna bring us back on the agenda that I had for myself-

7. 18:04 – 23:15

   What to look for in a growth advisor

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky18:04

   2. LLLuc Levesque18:04

      Yeah.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky18:04

      ... which is I want to start with talking about growth advisorships and advising and growth advisors.

   4. LLLuc Levesque18:09

      Mm-hmm.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky18:09

      You've been a growth advisor for a long time.... to some of the most amazing companies out there; Twitter, Pinterest, Patreon, Canva, Thumbtack. I'm sure there's others that you don't list that are more informal. I work at Shopify. And so what I think about here is, a lot of founders are- often think about, "Should I bring on an advisor? What should I look for in an advisor?" I've heard stories of advisors being useless sometimes.

   6. LLLuc Levesque18:32

      Mm-hmm.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky18:33

      People tell me, "I don't need advisors."

   8. LLLuc Levesque18:34

      Mm-hmm.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky18:35

      So, I guess the question here is just, what's your take on when it makes sense to bring on and consider bringing on a growth advisor, and what should people look for when they're exploring and talking to a potential growth advisor?

   10. LLLuc Levesque18:47

       A few thoughts. W- in terms of when, I, I don't think you can probably come into early. It's probably harder to find really good ones than it is to time it, but generally speaking, I would say you don't want to focus too much on growth until you have product market fit, so make sure you have a product that users love that's either showing strong signs of retention or has some good loop that you can see that, that you can start thinking about growth.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky19:08

       Let me follow on that thread real quick, 'cause I find some founders still want to have someone come help them with growth even though they know they don't have product market fit, even though this tip comes up every single time when I'm talking (laughs) to a growth person, like, wait till you have product market fit before doing growth stuff. So, could you just add, like, a little bit of why that's important, while we're on the topic?

   12. LLLuc Levesque19:27

       Growth advice is generally always applicable, and if you can start thinking about how to build your product, uh, early, even if it's pre-product market fit, it's not gonna do any damage, but you may be wasting some capital on an advisor or a growth person too early. The problem that I see is if you start growing a product that doesn't have product market fit, you're actually doing more damage than, than good, because you have a product that is now being exposed to the market through growth levers and through optimization that is giving a bad experience with your product, and you want that, that product that you know is tight and you know has product market fit to start building the flywheel and start growing. You don't want it to be, uh, growing if it doesn't, uh, satisfy that need that you're trying to build out for. So I can see it having more damage than good, because when somebody tries something, they're unlikely to try it again. And so it's, that's, that's the dangerous game you can get into, so you, you're better off with a good product that's satisfying a need and then growing from there. I will say, to kind of play devil's advocate with myself and, and something that I've, um, done actually in one of the products, I've built, uh, several consumer products and grown them, the, is that sometimes to know if you have a product, you need users to use it. So there's, like, some subtlety in here, but I would say if you are trying to get users in to start playing with it at scale, I mean, try to focus in on a, on a market that is maybe off the grid, like pick a country that's, I, I... Some English-speaking country that's a bit off the grid that you can isolate your marketing to so you can start getting dozens or a couple of hundred people per day coming in and giving you feedback. I've seen that work too. So I'd say wait till you have product market fit. If you do start growing your product early because you need that signal from people actually using it beyond just, um, focus groups and friends or, or small numbers of people, try to do it off the grid in, in smaller markets that you can g- kind of contain the growth and get what you're really trying to get, which is that signal on is it working or not.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky21:19

       Awesome. Okay. I threw us off track. (laughs) Let's get back on track. So we were talking about when it makes sense to find a growth advisor and then what to look for in someone that you might wanna work with.

   14. LLLuc Levesque21:27

       I mean, what makes a great growth advisor is somebody who really understands what to do but also why certain growth levers work. It's that kind of deep understanding of levers of onboarding or whatever area they're focusing on that really s- uh, makes growth advisors stand out. So when you're looking for a growth advisor, you wanna have those discussions to see, like, how much depth does this person have? Have they, you know, seen the playbook and they're just good at repeating the playbook, or are they evolving? Are they growing? And the best way to, to get to know that is to start really asking them questions about growth and growth advising and the certain things that they've done and why they think those have worked. This can be tricky if you don't yourself know growth. So I think one, one thing that I have not seen a lot of founders do that I would advise is, if you have an advisor already, 'cause this applies to finding growth advisors but it also applies to hiring good, good growth talent. So if you have somebody you know, whether it's already an advisor or somebody you know who knows growths, you can solicit their help in trying to flush out whether somebody you're trying to hire is of high talent. So if you have an advisor, you can a- make, make that one of their, their roles is vet out any new talent coming in, and if you're looking for an advisor, try to s- to find somebody (laughs) that you know and trust who can do that first pass, because for somebody who knows growth that you trust, it's actually not a lot of work for them to vet out how talented someone else is, and, uh, it's an easy ask, uh, to make and something that if you, if you have that (laughs) person in your network or that work with you that you can leverage for. But I haven't seen that too often where founders kind of take advantage of people they know or e- existing advi- growth advisors to help recruit and vet talent, because it can be quite hard if you don't know the growth space to, to know if somebody's good or not.

8. 23:15 – 26:52

   The large impact Luc made from a small conversation

   1. LLLuc Levesque23:15

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky23:15

      That's a really interesting idea, and it could be where you find someone that's too busy to work with you but maybe you could just ask, "Hey, could you at least help me vet people?" And it takes a lot less time.

   3. LLLuc Levesque23:26

      Yeah, I've never been asked that which is, I mean, I don't know if I'll start getting asked this now but, (laughs) but it does seem like that's a really simple way to add a ton of value, uh, and as a founder, I mean, even if you have to pay this person or, uh, whatever you have to do, but it's, it's a, it's such an important hire to get right. You know, we talk about the 10X engineer and we don't really talk about the, the 10X growth, uh, advisor or 10X growth person, but the same dynamic applies, you could argue applies even more, because the right growth advisor can have literally company changing impact, where they're either building or helping to ideate or helping to implement a, uh, growth loop that literally changes the company. As we know, you need a great product and you need a great growth loop and it's usually just one loop that you need to get right. Most companies have gotten to where they are just off of one really strong channel that they've just dominated, so it's important to get right.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky24:17

      Is there an example of that sort of impact that you've seen in your advisorship or other people's, of just an impact from one conversation or a little bit of the help?

   5. LLLuc Levesque24:25

      Uh, definitely. Uh, and I think what I would point to is, the advantage of a growth advisor is it takes a long time to understand a channel. And certainly, you know, people have to know their stuff, they have to be d- uh, very good at their craft, their growth craft, but also they have to be exposed to a large set of experiments or an environment where they've just seen what works and what doesn't. So, no matter how good somebody is, if they haven't been exposed to an environment where there's a lot of experimentation, a lot of learning, it's very hard for them to, to internalize that. So once you've, once a growth advisor has that, it's, takes years to learn it, but it literally can take seconds, literally, to communicate that. So I've worked with, uh, some companies that you've mentioned and, uh, certainly have had impact very, very quickly. I mean, one example would be a company that I worked with, now a public company, at the time they weren't. On day one, walked in, they presented their strategy, their plans, their funnels and their, their landing pages, and I could see very quickly that there was something they were doing that was a little off, and I asked them, "W- why are you, why are you doing it that way?" And they said, "Well, it just, we think it just looks better that way." And I said, "Well, just do it this other way." (laughs) And I remember this because it was such a short conversation, and then three weeks later we connected and I heard they had rolled it out and it was a large, uh, impact, uh, that, that they had fr- from this one change. And it's just a good example of this h- this has happened many times with the companies I've worked with, but it's a good example that it's, it's not actually h- once you know it, it's not hard to recognize it and to, if you deeply understand it, to give advice. But it takes a long time to get the, the base knowledge. So I don't do these too often anymore, but when I do advise, I, I take them very seriously and I focus exclusively on having impact. And, uh, I think that's really important because like you say, there's a lot of advisors out there, uh, some of them, uh, are great, some of them, you know, different qualities, and you really wanna make sure that if you are an advisor, you want to be in the camp of know when this person comes in, they have a lot of impact, and it takes time and focus and energy and, and alignment, and there's a bunch of things we can talk about that, that helps to drive that alignment, but, uh, having impact is the most important thing, whether you're an advisor or if you're, you're hiring in, because it's, it's one of those weird disciplines where the right person at the right time can literally say a sentence that changes the trajectory of your company, and you can't say that for a lot of different disciplines, but this is one of them.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky26:49

      There's that word impact again.

   7. LLLuc Levesque26:51

      Impact, impact.

9. 26:52 – 31:35

   Advice on compensating advisors

   1. LLLuc Levesque26:52

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky26:52

      The point you just made about how one conversation can have a ton of impact-

   3. LLLuc Levesque26:56

      Mm-hmm.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky26:56

      ... is a reminder of why sometimes the price of an advisor feels absurd or like for one hour it's like thousands of dollars.

   5. LLLuc Levesque27:04

      Yeah.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky27:04

      But it's because obviously they spent a decade learning a thing and one conversation is all that work they put into it, uh, crystallized for you in the moment.

   7. LLLuc Levesque27:13

      Exactly. And, and it's something I've experienced several times in hindsight when you're like, "Okay, here's the needle in the haystack," and then it's implemented and you can see h- hundreds of percentages, sometimes over a thousand percent lift when you get it right. It's exhilarating. It's great. I have, uh, something I, I used to say, which is you want your impact to be so big there's a slide in the next board deck on like try to explain what happened. And that can happen when you are, uh, advising companies because, uh, because you're able to share very quickly, uh, insights. But one way to, to drive alignment is, not everybody can do this, not all advisors do it this way, but I personally love just when you, when I do these, which, which is not that frequent, just purely doing equity, and because I love the alignment in outcomes, where the founder will be successful and you will be successful. So the incentives are, are really good to drive, uh, the right performance and the right outcomes that, that you want as a founder. So if you can do it, I would definitely advise, uh, founders to bring advisors in for equity if you can, and I, I think the same applies for your internal growth team. You wanna make sure that the, uh, teams are incentivized not on activities, on doing stuff, uh, because there's a lot of stuff to be done in growth, but really driving the outcomes that, that you want, and equity is just a great way of saying, "Hey, we're in this together, we're on the same side of the table. Let's grow, grow this, this company."

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky28:36

      I was actually about to ask you what kind of structure you recommend for an advisorship. Is there anything else you can share about just like what you'd recommend a founder do in terms of compensation for an advisor?

   9. LLLuc Levesque28:45

      There's a couple things. I think I, I do... I'm a big fan of, of equity because of the alignment of incentives. You should think about, without getting into too much detail of the, the actual structure of the deals, but think about how you vest, uh, the equity. The last thing you want is an advisor holding back on sharing knowledge. The ideal engagement would be an advisor comes in, delivers as much value as possible quickly, and then trains your team, and then maybe it's a one-year engagement, and hopefully they've learned because the advisor's been incentivized to share as much as possible and to train the team as much as possible, and then ideally you don't need them anymore after. So there's something there about structuring, uh, equity vesting. I'm a big fan of vesting earlier rather than later. So think about in, in terms of structure your vesting commensurate with the value you want, which is very much front-loaded. I'm also a big fan of three-month cliffs, something I, I've, I've done, I, I always do actually, is, uh, listen in the first three months you'll know both sides if it's working or not, and you want to de-risk that on both sides, 'cause it really should be seen as a partnership between the advisor and the founder. And if the founder thinks you're not adding value in the first few months, I think they should just tear it up and, and both sides move on. It's not good for the founder to continue the deal and it's not good, frankly, for the, uh, advisor because they're not, for some reason, able to add value in that environment. So I love a three-month cliff at the beginning where, uh, if it's not working in the first three months, you tear up the deal and, and both parties walk away and it de-risks the entire thing, and again, drives incentives in the right way where the advisor is 100% incentivized to add as much value as fast as possible. So that, that's another thing that I've...... that I tend to do, and I- I've done it for a long time.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky30:27

       That's a really good tip. Basically, don't do four-year investing for advisors, probably not even to your ... But yeah, yeah.

   11. LLLuc Levesque30:32

       There's a bunch of ways to do it. Honestly, it's hard enough to find growth advisors that have capacity, so you got to also say, like, what can you do that the advisor's comfortable with? But yeah, I mean, just to be candid, I think you want to structure it in a way where you're not dependent on the advisor over time; they're adding a ton of value, they're helping teach the team, they're probably bouncing around because your company's changing, your team's changing, your leaders are changing. But over time, and, you know, that can be, that can be years, but: it shouldn't be indefinite. You shouldn't need an advisor forever. I've seen a scenario where there's desire to keep the advisor on almost as insurance, like if something goes wrong, I just wanted to be able to pick up the phone. That, that can make sense, but I do think a good growth advisor is incentivized to share as much as possible, as fast as possible, to have impact, to train your team, and then whether you want to keep them on or not long term as an insurance policy or just to answer questions as things change, uh, that should be a choice, and not because, "Ah, if we lose the advisor, we're, you know, we're completely screwed." That would be a bad place for you to be in a- as a founder.

10. 31:35 – 33:33

    How to find a good growth advisor using VCs and your network

    1. LLLuc Levesque31:35

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky31:35

       You said it's hard to find a good advisor, 100% agree. Any advice for people to help them find an advisor that might be the right fit?

    3. LLLuc Levesque31:43

       Yeah, I would say there's more of them these days than there were, uh, even just five years ago or, uh, 10 years ago. I would start with, depending on your situation, if you're a founder, I would start with your investors. I think VCs have an amazing network of advisors. I get, I don't know, a couple of requests a week, uh, that I'm, I'm not taking right now, but that from my experience and what I've, what I've seen, that's probably the, the high, especially the high-end VCs, the very talented VCs will have this network and it, eh, frankly, it's a great partnership as an advisor for you to have. You can help the companies, you can help the VCs, and it helps you, so everybody wins. Just asking, eh, eh, other founders if they had good experience, much like hiring. The third advice I would give is to find companies that are world class at what you're trying to grow, what channel or skill you're looking at, and then reach out and see if there's a way to, to help that way. That's actually how I got started. I was at TripAdvisor and a prominent VC reached out, one of the companies they were working with needed some help on SCO, got connect... I was still in Canada at the time, got connected with them, had a phone call, had a significant impact through that one phone call, and rather than joining as an advisor, I essentially helped them out pro bono, uh, in exchange for, "Hey, this, um, I want to get connected in the Valley." So I was in Canada, I wanted to start another company, I wanted to get connected. So through that, that tactic where they reached out for, to a company that was known to be world class at SCO, I think that was really smart on this, this VC's part. And then maybe some advice to up and coming, uh, growth advisors would be, you know, that first one I, I didn't take a single shred of equity or, or, or money and just tried to have as much impact as possible and to help out this company as much as possible, and then made sure that I was able to get connected to other people that I wanted to meet in the Bay Area and then kind of things snowballed from there.

11. 33:33 – 38:15

    The importance of having an in-house person and growth advisors as support

    1. LLLuc Levesque33:33

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky33:33

       I definitely want to chat about how to become a growth advisor 'cause I think, uh, people listening here might be like, "Oh, well, that sounds pretty good. Some day or maybe I'll become a growth advisor." But before we get to that, what are things that an advisor are best suited for versus finding someone full time versus no one? Like, what are the ideal kind of problem sets for an advisor versus a full time hire person?

    3. LLLuc Levesque33:57

       I would say your ideal setup is always, your preference should always be to have somebody in-house. I'll start there, because you want to have that as part of the culture, there's so much more that they can do when they're in-house. That being said, if you can't find somebody in-house, then bring on advisor. E- even if you bring on an advisor, some advice to founders would be you want to surround your, your team or at l- one person that you've identified who's just a amazing world class doer, even if they don't know growth, with a set of growth advisors so that they're learning, that's being put through the culture of the company and that, that knowledge is, stays inside of the company. So I'd say you generally prefe- I would prefer to go internal, surround the, these people with great advisors and then, uh, and then take it from there. That would be how I'd approach it.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky34:41

       Okay, so two thoughts here. One is I feel like this podcast is becoming an interesting way to discover awesome growth advisors, and I think over time I'm building this directory of, like, who are awesome smart growth people that are open to advising, so that could be an interesting opportunity just to look through the folks on this podcast, and...

    5. LLLuc Levesque34:59

       Yes. Yeah, there's some great people that have been on here, definitely.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky35:02

       I'm slowly working my way through all the amazingly smart growth people and product leaders. The other is I've noticed there, a lot of the best growth advisors have worked with the same sorts of companies. I find-

    7. LLLuc Levesque35:13

       Mm-hmm.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky35:13

       ... Miro comes up a lot, Canva comes up a lot, Pinterest.

    9. LLLuc Levesque35:16

       Mm-hmm.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky35:16

        Like, all these people that I've worked with, say, Pinterest-

    11. LLLuc Levesque35:18

        Yeah.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky35:19

        ... that I hear about are just awesome. Casey comes to mind. Melissa Tan who's coming out with a podcast, I think she worked with them. Uh, Dropbox. Anyway, so maybe one idea is see who (laughs) these companies work with as advisors and that can maybe points you to people that, um, are worth exploring.

    13. LLLuc Levesque35:34

        That, I mean, I, I, that's a good idea. The, um, it kind of goes back to something I mentioned earlier which is companies that have a lot of traffic and that have a lot of users are a great learning ground for growth people and for advisors because- ... uh, no matter how smart you are, you need, you need the reps, you got to go to the growth gym and, and put in the reps which is experiments, you've got to try things, things are going to work, things aren't going to work, and there's a discipline of, like, when something doesn't work, you can learn almost as much as when something works. So but you need that traffic, you need that environment, and that's why certain companies have these great people coming out like Casey at, at Pinterest and other people that have been at these companies that have the traffic, have the culture to support it, uh, to support growth, and, and I think that's, I don't think it's a coincidence why some of these companies have, uh, some great people coming from them.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky36:20

        The other tip I just thought about as you were talking is everyone's launching a Substack newsletter that has, is doing any sort of advising 'cause there's a lot of...... uh, power in, uh, building an audience, creating kind of awareness of what you do. So I wonder if another tip is search Substack's directory of newsletters for specific things you're dealing with, like say, go to market or PLG or sales and you might find someone there.

    15. LLLuc Levesque36:39

        I haven't done that, but that seems like a reasonable (laughs) way to do it.

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky36:42

        It's where we're all, they're all heading.

    17. LLLuc Levesque36:44

        I'm not saying that the people on Substack have this, but as advice to the people listening is when you're vetting for a growth advisor or growth talent, don't just weight it on the public halo of somebody. That's a common mistake I've seen, where, you know, maybe somebody's done presentations at a conference or somebody's done... I, I don't know, but their, their Twitter following i- is broad. They can be excellent. That's not a disqualifier immediately, but just make sure not to make the hire just exclusively on that. I've made that mistake a few times and, uh, it's a common one to get into. So make sure you're vetting properly, uh, even if somebody with a large following on Substack or, or Twitter. That, that's, uh, I think an important thing to keep in mind.

    18. LRLenny Rachitsky37:25

        1000% agree. I always say that the best product leaders, the best growth people don't have time to sit on Twitter and tweet and write newsletters. They're doing the job, working, building, growing, and maybe eventually they get out of that and start writing, but I 1000% agree. There's a lot of people-

    19. LLLuc Levesque37:40

        More than you. Not, not to disqualify (laughs) all the people on Twitter. Some of them are tweeting about-

    20. LRLenny Rachitsky37:45

        Absolutely.

    21. LLLuc Levesque37:45

        ... but, but my point is just, just be ... Don't over pivot on the halo. Uh, just do your ... I mean, look at their past performance, what, what, what teams have they been on, what, what environment do they have, do they really know growth? Uh, and sometimes they do, but I think it's a common mistake to say, "Oh, yeah, they have a large following, let's hire this person."

    22. LRLenny Rachitsky38:03

        100% agree.

    23. LLLuc Levesque38:04

        Yeah.

    24. LRLenny Rachitsky38:04

        Rarely does a celebrity kind of hire that seems really genius on Twitter and Substack end up being as amazing as you think.

    25. LLLuc Levesque38:12

        Yeah, it does happen, but yeah.

    26. LRLenny Rachitsky38:13

        It does happen, absolutely.

12. 38:15 – 41:59

    Tips for becoming a growth advisor

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky38:15

       One last question around this topic. People listening might want to become growth advisors, I mentioned this earlier. Is there any other advice you want to share of just like if you want to become a growth advisor someday, here's what you should think about?

    2. LLLuc Levesque38:26

       Yeah, I think the right mental model as a growth advisor is arou- the same one as an investor. So the most important thing an advisor can do, aside from having impact and knowing their craft, is picking which companies to work with, es- es- especially if you're working for equity. So I'll only speak to that, but you're basically putting in your time, you're picking a, uh, likely a smaller number, you only have so many hours in the day, of companies to work with, and you want to make sure there's a likely exit in the future. So for me personally, I have a, you know, a s- a spreadsheet like most big decisions that I make (laughs) in my life, and over the years I've just added criteria and questions to ask myself about the company and then reflect on, okay, is this kind of checking all the boxes for a likely outcome? Because you don't just need to be successful, you need to be successful and for the company to be successful and for there to be liquidity event. So you need to put yourself in the shoes of an investor and look at it as an investment. That is the ... Arguably the most important thing, because you can go and do a great job and then wait many years and potentially not see any, any, any reward for it. And that- I think that's the, the nice thing about the equity structure, in that you're, you're tied in the same, um, incentives with the founder, which is just great i- in terms of a relation- any relationship to have the same incentives, but you, you want to make sure that there's a good likelihood of a decent outcome down the road. The other ... If I can throw another one in.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky39:50

       Absolutely.

    4. LLLuc Levesque39:50

       The other piece of advice I would give is, um, it can take a long time for some of these companies to be successful. That's okay. You should expect that. In fact, you should just go in with that mindset. When I'm deciding to work with a company, I'm in there for 10 years, and I know that. And, and I say that. Uh, I say, "I'm in, I'm in. We're, we're in this together if I choose to work with the company." But it does mean that the structure of the (laughs) deal needs to reflect that. So you need to have a long tail at the end. So if you're taking options or RSUs and it's purely equity, make sure you have the time for that to happen. There would be nothing worse than putting in your heart and soul, having impact, and then waiting, I don't know, a couple of years, and then your equity expires. So you make sure there's a long tail. I mean, it can take ... It can literally take over 10 years for these companies to exit, and you should be okay with that. Uh, I think that's okay. You're taking some risks, they're taking some risk on you, and that's a great partnership, but you'll just need the time for that. So advice to growth, (laughs) growth advisors, make sure to, to ask for a, a long tail so that you don't, uh, end up in, in a bad spot in the end, and that incentives again-

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky40:49

       Mm-hmm.

    6. LLLuc Levesque40:49

       ... are perfectly aligned between the founder and the advisor.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky40:52

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13. 41:59 – 45:29

    The power of SEO

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky41:59

       So I want to segue to a different topic, SEO. You're kind of the, uh ... You tell me, but it feels like you're one of the earliest, uh, SEO people in tech. You helped grow TripAdvisor many years ago, and it was mostly SEO driven, I think innovated a lot of the SEO tactics and strategies. And then you helped Pinterest, Thumbtack, other companies that are very SEO driven. You talked about how many companies grow through one channel, and these are all very SEO driven companies. I imagine Shopify has a lot of SEO work that's happening right now with you there. And so I want to chat about SEO-So I guess broadly, SEO is like... It's like this amazing growth channel. It's like basically free. It continues to work after you stop doing any work on it, you know, for a while. Many founders think about, "Should we invest in SEO? How do we approach SEO?" So maybe just as a first question, what are, what are signs that your product and company is a good fit for SEO being potentially a huge channel for growth?

    2. LLLuc Levesque42:55

       Yeah. I've been doing SEO for a really long time. Uh, it's a lot of fun. And, um, certainly being at TripAdvisor was, uh, a great learning ground, uh, for that, that we were able to really innovate and try, try new things there in terms of the, the playbook that we, we built out. That was, uh, a lot of fun those, those years. Uh, couple thoughts. The first one would be, I, I do think there's an SEO play in any company, maybe to different extents, but Google is such a large funnel of existing demand for your product or your product area that there's usually an angle to get some SEO traffic there. So I do think it applies to most companies. Uh, I would say there... If you're an early product that's never seen, that the world's never seen, it's a brand new, brand new thing, uh, there might be some, uh, creation, some demand creation you need to do. But most of the time, there's existing demand in Google where you can harvest, uh, demand or there's queries that are related to your topic that you can start ranking for to start building brand awareness. So there's always some angle. And then I kind of divide websites or online products into two categories. There's the ones which are smaller sites, small number of pages, very targeted at your product, and don't have this kind of loop of creating new pages automatically. This would be, um, most, um, most e-commerce sites actually who have... would have a number of pages around their products and about us, those types of pages. That's one type of site. Let's say they have a dozen pages. And then there's other ones with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of pages which are either user-generated content, uh, or like TripAdvisor and Pinterest and others, or marketplaces like Thumbtack and other types of websites like that. Those are generally easier to see a huge amount of impact very quickly because there's such a large optimization surface, and ideally it's growing and generating traffic automatically. I've always thought of LinkedIn as just such a great example of this where you have this viral loop where you, you would... If you recall when it was just starting, uh, everybody was getting these invites from LinkedIn. And those come and go. You get an invite, you register, you don't. That, that happens. But the byproduct is when people join, they create this beautiful landing page, which is your profile, that gets indexed. It's kind of like a viral loop feeding an SEO loop that continues to grow. So that's a good example of user-generated content which kind of feeds on itself and grows. So there's those, those two categories. Going back to the first category, if you only have a small handful of pages, the way to, to think about that is you certainly want to optimize those pages, then you want to start creating content that speaks to your audience beyond that. So you need a content strategy, whether it's a blog or, or, or creating new

14. 45:29 – 49:21

    The two buckets of SEO

    1. LLLuc Levesque45:29

       parts of your site that address questions that your audience might have. But generally speaking, I think there's an SEO play in any company, and there's just different tactics, strategies, and approaches to get there.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky45:40

       Awesome. I never thought of it that way, that there's kind of these, these two buckets. So the first bucket is like you don't have a ton of pages that naturally are generated as a part of your experience, and the second is you do. And I guess in the second bucket, I think of Reddit and Glassdoor and Quora, TripAdvisor, great example, Pinterest. In the first bucket, is the way to generate pages basically it's like editorially like create... like write content and have people write things for you? Is that, is that gen- generally the strategy?

    3. LLLuc Levesque46:07

       There's different ways of doing it, but a con- good content strategy is a kind of tried and true approach, definitely.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky46:13

       And in that bucket of you don't naturally have a ton of pages, can you primarily grow through SEO? Or is SEO is always going to be this minority channel and you have to find something else?

    5. LLLuc Levesque46:24

       No. You can... It can be a big channel. And this is also about creating content, but it's not your users creating the content. You have to go create the content and, uh, have some high quality answer to a question that's being asked on, on Google. And, you know, I think one thing to keep in mind with SEO is entire industries are based off of single keywords. I remember when I was, uh, in the travel industry that, you know, literally companies were bought and sold based on one keyword rank. So it's not like, oh, it's a little bit of traffic. And I think this is a bit unintuitive with growth. A lot of people, they'll think of growth as linear or it's another channel or it's another thing. I mean, growth done right is exponential. It literally is company changing. When you're talking specifically about SEO, keep in mind the world is searching for that thing on that one... targeted on that one, that one keyword, and likely you're clicking the number one search result. So getting that number one spot is not like, oh, that's a little bit of traffic. That... You can literally build an entire business around that, that first spot. So don't think that's... Well, maybe it is commonly known, I'm not sure, but it's, it's definitely something that is non-obvious or intuitive I think to most people. And, uh, if you have an entire SEO team working on one keyword, I don't think that's crazy, uh, because as... one, you know, small number of keywords can define an entire industry or a business.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky47:37

       Is there an example of that sort of situation, one keyword building a massive company?

    7. LLLuc Levesque47:41

       Yeah. I mean, there's, there's, there's a lot, I'm sure. I can speak to, uh, my own company that I sold to TripAdvisor. It was, it was called TravelPod. It was a travel blogging website where you can think WordPress but for travel, uh, which I, I started early. I was the first site to do that. And I made the mistake of not knowing SEO or growth before I sold the company, and so that was a great learning for me when I went in. Um, there's this story where we're looking to acquire another site, and I thought the product was pretty poor, and I remember talking to the founder and thinking... he'd asked me if, if we'd want to acquire it, and, uh, "Uh, the product's terrible. Why would I want to acquire that?" He's like, "Yeah, they're 10 times bigger than you." And I'm, "What?" And that was, that was when I realized, okay, we've been building a great product and great engineering culture and... I- is important, but you really need to know this growth stuff. So that's, that's actually the moment I shifted to, all right, we have to really know this, these growth levers. And in that space, the number one keyword was travel blog.And so owning that was a big deal, and we did not own it, and we, I think, were ranked number two for a really long time. I, uh, I can't remember if we got it in the end, but, uh, that's just one example where... And there was many, many travel businesses where, um... I always love looking at a business and, like, trying to figure out what's their growth loop, like how did they do that? It's not like, "Oh, it's a great business that just grew," most of the time, it's, you know, Priceline crushed it at SCM, Facebook crushed it out of our loop, where you got tagged in a photo, you got an email, and you had to go register 'cause th- there's a photo of you somewhere (laughs) you really want to see. TripAdvisor did a great job at SEO and... and it's often, it's just one really strong channel that propelled the company forward, and in this case, it can literally come down to one keyword like, like we had at TravelPod.

15. 49:21 – 51:49

    Channels of growth

    1. LLLuc Levesque49:21

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky49:21

       This may be a good time just to give, uh, people a mental model of the different channels/loops that exist. So you've talked about SEO is one, paid search is one. What are the... what's like the collection for people to think about and, like- usually, as you said, one of these is the primary source of growth for a company.

    3. LLLuc Levesque49:38

       Yeah, there's a- there's a variety of them. I think you have to look at where the intent is right now, and, uh, it does change over time, but you have social channels like TikTok, Instagram, uh, influencers are a great, uh, area to- to engage with there. You have SEO, you have search. I think chat- ChatGPT is another upcoming one that, uh, we might want to talk about a little bit, where I do think we've never seen that kind of growth for search before, and, uh, that's a platform that we have to start thinking about, how do we optimize for it? And Google just announced their recent changes, they're going to be putting in an AI box at the top of the search results, so how do you optimize in a world where it's not so much about optimizing for the platform, but teaching the AI what you do and why you're the best in the world at it? Uh, so that's- that's another, a whole other area we could- we could talk about, but that's- that's a big channel I think that- that's growing. Buyer loops are always a- a powerful thing if you can get them to work. That's more about psychology and channel optimization, where you want people to be incentivized to share the product that you have with their friends, and then to have their friends come back and register, so you can have- you can have one buyer loop, you can have secondary buyer loops, you can bolt buyer loops on your existing products. There's different ways of doing this. And then, you know, just backing up, when I think about growth, I don't think about a specific... it's not growth equals SEO and Instagram. For me, growth equals whatever it takes to move the needle. So I get this question all the time, "How do you build a growth team? What does a growth team do?" And I say, "Whatever it takes." And that could be zero to one, building a new product, it could be M&A, it could be SEO, it could be social, it could be onboarding, and I think that's a- a better framework to look at, and then if you look at it through that lens, then, you know, partnerships easily folds into that, where I've seen a lot of businesses get very big on just really clever partnerships, either strategic or broad, kind of affiliate-based partnerships. So there's a lot of channels. I definitely wouldn't restrict the scope of a growth team to just a small subset, but- but have a very wide funnel in terms of, or at least strategy in terms of... just test a lot of different things and go after the channels that work and pivot- pivot, uh, pivot when it does. And then really lean into the one or two or three that really work, because sometimes that's all it takes for business.

16. 51:49 – 56:04

    The potential impact of ChatGPT on Google and SEO

    1. LLLuc Levesque51:50

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky51:50

       Well, you definitely nerd sniped me with the ChatGPT tease, so let's just spend some time there. I think this relates to just the general sense that SEO is always changing and it feels like this is... and SCM I guess in this case too, and ChatGPT and Bard I guess is maybe the latest change, so what should we know there?

    3. LLLuc Levesque52:05

       Yeah, I think we're all still trying to figure it out. I was at Google IO last week or the week before, and as soon as I saw the search result with the big box of AI answers at the top, having done this for so long, uh, I- I immediately knew the impact that I think is about to come. And I've seen this play out in travel, where, you know, Google acquired ITA and did flight search and hotel search. Uh, generally it's great for users and great for, uh, Google, uh, and the search engines, but makes it a little bit difficult for the publishers and, uh, the sites that are adding value to the ecosystem through- through being ranked in the search results. So, what we're about to see is basically Google, what they showed was a big box on top of the search results that answers the query directly. So, if you think about that, that means that there's a lot of queries right now that are, uh, that users are clicking through down on the organic links and getting their answer there, which will be answered directly in the search results. We've seen this play out over the last 10 or 5 to 10 years, where more and more answers are being shown at the top. Every time something changes, i- entire industries are disrupted or- or changed, and I think that's going to happen again, so... There's different types of keywords. There's transactional ones like e-commerce keywords and- and pur- with purchase intent, there's navigational ones where you're trying to get somewhere, and there's informational keywords, which is, "I have a question, I'm looking for an answer." It's pretty broad. It's a big area. I think that last category of keywords is particularly at risk, so if any body listening to this is currently getting traffic on those, you should start thinking about what does that mean when things start changing? And I think the changes will be... we'll probably start seeing things shift to paid, you have to pay for that free traffic. And the second one is, there may just be a case where those keywords just don't- don't get many clicks anymore, you might drop down to a very small number of clicks, uh, if at all, because answers will get, uh, questions will get answered directly in the search results, so it's a- it's a big shift. We have to see how things land, but that's, I think, over the next 12 to 24 months, if history repeats itself, we'll- we'll see that channel change. And we've seen this play out in all the different channels, they kind of evolve. Generally the- the, uh, you can't blame the companies, they're doing what they have to do. ChatGPT is now 50% of my daily searches and not Google, so I think, uh, Google has to react and this is what we'll see. So from a growth perspective, definitely something to start thinking about.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky54:25

       Super fascinating, uh, I think about my newsletter and now (laughs) Google suck it all up and just tell you all the answers. Great, good news for me, just kidding.

    5. LLLuc Levesque54:34

       Any publisher

    6. NANarrator54:34

       Yeah.

    7. LLLuc Levesque54:34

       ... but speaking

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky54:35

       Yeah.

    9. LLLuc Levesque54:35

       ... on there now, yes.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky54:36

        (laughs) Yeah, right. I- I- yeah, and change is great, you know? Things don't need-

    11. LLLuc Levesque54:41

        It's exciting, it's exciting. We haven't had a big, uh, like just...... geeking out on growth a little bit. We haven't had a big platform change in a long time, so I'm like, "All right, cool. We get to... Let's go see what we can do here." Uh, how do- how do you optimize this? How do you, how do you, you know, how do you get listed, if you can? We're not sure where the placements will be, but that will be the new game.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky54:58

        Yeah. Uh, there's actually a, a lennybot.com that is a GPT bot trained on my content that... There's a newsletter post about how it was all built so you could build your own. And so I think my new goal is gonna have to be to convince people to go to lennybot.com instead of Google. Wish me luck.

    13. LLLuc Levesque55:15

        Yeah. That's just... You gotta lean into it. Yeah. We have a, we have a shop.ai, this great, uh, AI-based shopping engine. I'll tell you, I, I bought so much on it. It's so good. I... It's... The more you use these technologies, the more you realize how good they are, and, uh, that something big is coming. It's not just, "Oh, yeah. There's another change." I was summarizing the Google changes to, um, some people and originally was thinking, "This is the biggest change in the last 10 years." And then when I reflected on the last 10 years, I thought, "Mm. This is actually the biggest change since the s- since the inception of Google, actually." I don't think we've seen something as profound as what's coming and you really need to get ready for it.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky55:51

        Damn.

    15. LLLuc Levesque55:52

        Yeah.

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky55:53

        I've been using ChatGPT for helping me with interview questions actually and once in a while there's like a really good one.

    17. LLLuc Levesque55:59

        Oh, that's cool.

    18. LRLenny Rachitsky56:00

        So thank you ChatGPT bringing me good things also.

17. 56:04 – 58:19

    Advice on hiring an SEO person

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky56:04

       Maybe one more question along these lines around kind of connecting advisorship and SEO. Would you suggest when you're starting to think about SEO, starting to invest in SEO, you might be listening to this feeling like, "I gotta think about SEO," does it make sense to bring on, say, a SEO advisor like you? I know you're not available currently but other folks like you? Or are an agency that is really good at this stuff? Or bring on someone full-time? Do you have any kind of frameworks for thinking about which direction to go?

    2. LLLuc Levesque56:30

       It's hard for an agency or a pure advisor without internal help to do it, a really good job, without internal talent at, at the center. So I would say, I would start with just hire somebody internally and, uh, give them the mandate to incentivize them correctly to go and own this, this channel. If, even if they don't know SEO, my advice would be hire, get an engineer, get somebody who is just a relentless doer who wants to learn this and surround them with great advisors. That, I've just seen that work really well. There are some good agencies out there. Agencies will be working with multiple companies, so it's a little bit harder to get the same impact from an agency. It can work sometimes, but, uh, my preference is generally a last resort would be an agency. And I'd much rather have somebody who's internal, who knows the business, who knows the keywords, who knows... Who ha- who can have the knowledge internally inside the company permanently and help grow a team around them and, you know, have succession in place and a proper team so that you're not too dependent on this, this one person. But that would be my, my go-to. And then if you're really stuck, you can use advi- uh, agencies. But my, my default would be having somebody internal supplemented with agencies if you have to.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky57:39

       Mm-hmm.

    4. LLLuc Levesque57:39

       SEO is like... SEO is very, um, very specific. I mean there, there's... It's a very tight channel that certain, knowing certain things about it can have a big impact. And, um, I think you do want people that are... have that experience that can bring that in from, uh, from the outside to augment the internal team, so it'll take a really long time to learn it.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky58:01

       Awesome. I was gonna ask that. So you ideally want to find someone that's done it before, that isn't just a relentless learner but like is that plus has done SEO in the past before?

    6. LLLuc Levesque58:08

       Oh, yeah. I- ideally you hire an amazing SEO person you can bring internal. Second would be somebody amazing who can get things done, surround them with advisors. And then in my stack rank would probably be third would be

18. 58:19 – 1:00:07

    How long it takes for SEO to make an impact

    1. LLLuc Levesque58:19

       agencies.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky58:20

       Awesome. And then the other kind of common issue with SEO is it takes a long time to show impact. Do you have just a rule of thumb of just like give them this much time to see if they can make an impact?

    3. LLLuc Levesque58:29

       I'd say a few things. I'd say if you already have content and pages that are, are pretty good and getting a decent amount of traffic, it doesn't necessarily have to take a long time. So that would be my, my first reaction. It, it can take a long time. Generally, it takes a long time when you have to build new content. Uh, so the way to think about Google is it is going to take your content, it's going to show it to its users, people that are searching, and it's gonna determine which piece of content is the best to rank highly. It's not just about little, you know, tricks and links and keyword ratios. That, those days are over. Those do matter, but it's not purely about that. And if you have a new piece of content, it takes time for Google to build enough trust to say, "Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna start showing this to users now and then start collecting user feedback and then rank it appropriately." That can take some time. Uh, but if you have existing pages that are ranking, you know, eight and they're already on the first page, it does... doesn't always happen, but I've certainly seen it. In fact, more common than not that you can have, you know, sometimes hundreds of percentages of lift very quickly and it depends what you're starting with is probably the right way to think about it. So if I'm trying to summarize it, I would say 12 months is probably like max. If you can't see impact in 12 months, there's something wrong. I- if you have existing content, it could happen pretty early. It could happen on day one, actually. I've seen that, uh, happen. It could happen... If you have to build new parts of the site, it can take months. I've seen that happen in companies I've worked with where I think it would be like a quarter we had to wait till we saw a, a big lift. So it's somewhere between, you know, three to 12 months. Yeah.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:05

       Awesome. That's really helpful.

19. 1:00:07 – 1:06:46

    Self-reflection, cold plunge, and other tools Luc uses to excel in his personal and work life

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:07

       Okay, so final topic/final question. You've had a truly incredible career. You've worked with incredible companies, incredible leaders. I'm looking at your site here in the side window and you're like, "Here's a picture of you and Zach. Here's a picture of you and Tobi from ShopWhy." And there's, uh, there's more. And I'm curious what you believe has been key to your success, in your career success, that you suggest listeners who want to have some measure of similar success do?

    2. LLLuc Levesque1:00:36

       There's probably a, uh, a bunch of things we could talk about here. Uh, you know, just the obvious things like I think you've, you've just got to love what you do. Uh, you got to work hard. You have to have impact. Certainly, at the end of the day, in growth, that's all that will matter. If I, if I think back to...... specific things that I do though that, if I had to pick one thing that's been very important for me throughout my journey, is the art of self-reflection and, and co- coaches. I've had coaches my, my whole career. But, but the, the macro theme is you're constantly iterating, experimenting, and becoming the best you can be in your career, also as a dad and as a husband. But, uh... And of course for your own, your own personal health. But, um, that reflection is so important and I've leveraged many, many different coaches over the years, and now do a lot of, uh, self-reflection through a morning routine that I have, and that I've been doing for, for quite some time, that has been a big unlock for me. And the biggest, most important part of that morning routine is like dedicating an hour aside to really think about what's going well, what's not going well, what am I screwing up? W- why am I screwing it up? Which is often more important than what am I screwing up. And of course, what am I gonna do about it? But as long as you're learning and iterating every day, then you're just making constant progress towards your goals. And it's something I do that I, I love doing. I love thinking. Uh, so I, I literally can just sit there and think, uh, for hours actually. And I have a dashboard on all the areas that I'm focusing on with, like, red, yellow, green, and just constantly revving on what am I working on improving? What am I doing? What experiments am I running and where am I doing well and where am I not doing well and how can I be better as a... in all areas of my life, including being a leader? So that... If I... There's a lot of different things to it, but I, I think that's, that's really important and something that I've, I've learned over the years that is probably the most, most valuable to, to have as a skill.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:32

       Okay. I definitely want to spend more time on this. So you said you sit for an hour reflecting on what's going well, what's not going well. Is there more you can share about how you accomplish that, how you find time to do this for an hour? Anything else

    4. LLLuc Levesque1:02:43

       Yeah. It sounds crazy when you say it, but I do. Um, the, uh... So I, I wake up at 5:00. I, um, work out. So I do cardio, I do, uh, some, uh, exercise. There's this great book called Spark, which is all around the neuroscience of exercise and really, uh, learned a lot from that in terms of having this great morning routine that really boots you up. I kind of call it my bootloader. When I start end of day, if I go through my bootloader, I have a, a... just a much better day. So exercise, uh, stretching, meditation, uh, and then I- I do a cold plunge now. So I do a bunch of different things. But then I, I, I, I do some reading, but I, I do carve aside, yeah, one hour, where I go through... And this is probably important, as it's kind of where I've landed, but structured self-reflection. So that's why I have this dashboard. I have certain areas that I, I think about what's going well, what's not. I track all the experiments I'm running. And I'm just really passionate about, you know, if you're gonna do something, try to do it as best as you can. And this is a habit that has allowed me to, to kind of sharpen my, my skills in certain areas.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:47

       What are some of these things you're working on, if you can share? Like what's on this dashboard? How can people imagine what this might be?

    6. LLLuc Levesque1:03:53

       So there's a lot of personal stuff on it, but it literally is broken down between, you know, being a better friend, better husband, better dad, uh, and then better leader. And so on a... I mean, on the personal side, I... You know, I've been known to, to, to work a lot of times. You know, balance is, is always hard to, to find. And, you know, from being a dad, and, uh, and thinking about how to be better there, I realized, you know, about six months ago that I've never actually asked for feedback on how I'm doing.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:24

       Mm-hmm.

    8. LLLuc Levesque1:04:25

       So I asked my kids, uh, six months ago, I asked both of them independently, "What's one thing I can do to be a better... to do more of or do less of to be a better dad?" And, you know, they were kind of c- caught off guard by it. My son's 15 and my other son is 12. And, uh, I said, "Gi- take some time to think about it." And after about a month, uh, my son came back and said, "Dad, I've, I've, I got one." He said, "I want to spend more time with you."

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:54

       Mm-hmm.

    10. LLLuc Levesque1:04:56

        And so I... That, you know... That was, that was very helpful for me to hear. And I'm big on routines and habits to make sure that things that you want to do are repeatable and it's not one, one-off things. So ever since that day, I've now have a, a daddy date, if you want to call it. But every two weeks we do, uh, one-on-one time, uh, together with each of the boys. They get to pick what we do. Just so we have that consistent, whether it's dinner or play basketball in the front. But, but it's, you know, it's all about feedback. So that's one example on the personal side.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:27

        This reminds me of a tweet I just saw where someone said that the only people that are gonna remember that you worked late for many nights is your kids.

    12. LLLuc Levesque1:05:35

        Mm. Wow. Wow, that's deep.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:41

        Yeah.

    14. LLLuc Levesque1:05:41

        I like that a lot.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:42

        I know. As a soon-to-be parent, that's gonna stick with me.

    16. LLLuc Levesque1:05:46

        Wow. I like that a lot. So it's, it's tough, right? It's tough to balance it all out. Um, very difficult, 'cause you want to excel at everything you do in life and, uh, you have to... So that reflection helps be a check-in as well of like, "How am I doing in all these areas?" And that's... I find the color coding is, is helpful for that too, of just doing a, a bit of a gut check and, and, and asking for, for that feedback.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:06

        This also makes me think about, I was watching a Jeff Bezos interview and I asked him what his morning routine was and he said that he just likes to putter around.

    18. LLLuc Levesque1:06:13

        Okay.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:13

        He likes to just sit around, talk to his kids, read the newspaper. Like, he doesn't book any meetings in the morning because-

    20. LLLuc Levesque1:06:19

        Smart.

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:19

        ... he just finds he just needs like a little flex time at the beginning.

    22. LLLuc Levesque1:06:23

        Totally. So I read... Before I became a dad, I read somewhere that the... one of the most impactful things you can do as a father is just be there for dinner every night. So I have been there for 15 years every single night. But it was a good reminder that it's not enough. You know, having dinner is important with your family, but in, in, in our case, there's, there's more you can do and, uh, just getting that feedback and doing some, some re-prioritization is always important.

20. 1:06:46 – 1:10:33

    Luc’s famous dinner guild

    1. LLLuc Levesque1:06:46

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:46

       Speaking of dinners, and maybe just as a last question, I know you do this really interesting thing where you have dinners with interesting people. You just kind of invite them to your house. I don't know if interesting is the right way to describe it, but just kind of-... uh, interesting people, prominent people. Can you just talk about what, what that is and what you think of that-

    3. LLLuc Levesque1:07:01

       Yeah.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:01

       ... and what, and the benefits of doing something like that?

    5. LLLuc Levesque1:07:04

       I think in- interesting is the right way to think about it.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:06

       Okay. (laughs)

    7. LLLuc Levesque1:07:07

       I, um, I started this when I was in Ottawa with, uh, a bunch of founders there and, uh, it's become one of my favorite things to do. Honestly, it's like the bright spot in my month that I call them guilds. Uh, so the word guild is-

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:23

       Mm-hmm.

    9. LLLuc Levesque1:07:23

       ... with builders. And that's how it originally started so, you know, guild night is what, what I call it. And the idea is basically, you know, all interesting people doing interesting things actually want to spend time with each other. That's why I'm actually surprised more people don't do this, but I'll basically have interesting people come, usually five or six, and we'll sit around talking about specific topics. So I do one for consumer product, I do one for SEO, I do one for growth, growth leaders and just have really smart, interesting people come and we'll talk about different topics that are relevant. Sometimes we'll pick a topic, so we'll have a, a group and then we'll say, "Hey, we wanna talk about AI." So one of the advantages of being in the Bay Area is you can find three or four people that likely wrote some of the core code (laughs) in Google or in AI and then they'll join and people want to meet, people want to get together and have these conversations. So it's very exhilarating. I learn a ton. It's a lot of fun. I don't know why more people don't do it, and it's a bit of work to organize, but it's also just tactically been a great way to meet fascinating people. It's, uh, helped a lot for recruiting, for if you need a back channel, now you know all these people that are in different industries, but, but you know, business aside, they're very valuable business-wise, but they're just a lot of fun and they've become some of my, my favorite things that I do and I'm, I'm really surprised why more people don't do it because I think especially now that everybody's remote and we're working from home, or most people are, it's more valued than ever. So, so it's something I'm, I'm looking forward to continuing and always actually through my morning reflection thinking about what are new ones I can spin up who are interesting people that we want to, uh, break bread with? And I do think it's important that it's done at your house if anybody's thinking of starting this. Um, you can do it at a restaurant, but there's something about being in your home or being in somebody's home, five or six people having a great conversation about a topic that's mutually interesting and I think everybody values it and it's, uh, it adds a lot of, uh, spice to life. I think it's really important.

Episode duration: 1:20:11