Brian Balfour: Startup Growth Secrets from HubSpot; Distribution Stratagies; Impact of AI | E1049

Chaos is actually good for growth people because within that chaos lives these arbitrage opportunities, these new things that nobody else has figured out. And those sparks, those sparks are what give new companies and new things life and hope.

(instrumental music) Bryan, this is such a joy to do. I mean, I feel like I've interviewed like everyone from Reforge, and so I've been waiting for this show in anticipation. So thank you so much for joining me today.

Thanks for having me. I'll do my best to, uh, live up to all the rest of the folks you've interviewed, but, uh, we'll see how this goes. (laughs)

Listen, I heard nothing but wonderful things. I wanna start though with a little bit of an entry point, which is how did you first make your first foray into the world of growth as a starting point?

I made my way into growth where I would say like 70% of like the growth OGs made into growth, which was the early Facebook platform social gaming days. If you look at, like, some of the top people in growth, there's like a lineage. It's a- it- like almost like a coaching lineage, like, all the way back to the social gaming days. And so I had started this company, uh, shortly after school called Viximo, and, uh, we were in the social gaming space, uh, for a while, and then it kinda transitioned into mobile gaming. And that was like the perfect petri dish to essentially, like, create growth people, because what the Facebook platform did was that it opened up a ton of, like, viral channels as well as, like, paid acquisition channels. The games were very driven by, like, product-driven levers, uh, like virality. It was a highly quantitative game. You were playing this high, like, arbitrage game. You were constantly seeking out, like, the things and the APIs that people e- out- still, like, didn't understand. And games are so focused on, um, like, the psych- the psychological aspect of users to a degree that other software products aren't. And when you combine all of those things together, that's really kind of what growth turned into, which was understanding how your product grows, which is different than how your business and company grows. And we can talk a little bit about that later. Um, i- combining it with the quantitative elements of growth as well as with the psychological elements of growth, right? And so those three things combined, especially in a highly- high-pressure, high-competitive environment is what really formed, I think, the, like, initial injection into, uh, like, the growth scene. And so as a founder of that company, we- you know, there was like nobody who really knew what to do and how to do it. And so a big part of a founder's job is just, like, go solve the problems that you don't have other people for and figure it out. And that's how I got into it, and I just- I loved it. I actually loved the game of trying to find an opportunity that other people weren't seeing and figuring out how to exploit that. And, uh, there was just, like, that competitive nature of it that, like, really got to me combined with, like, my quantitative lean on, you know- like, on the world and my skillset. And so I just loved it, and I got into it and, uh, you know, been there ever since.