When to invest in new acquisition channels | Adam Grenier (Uber, MasterClass)

One of the biggest pieces of advice I'm giving to people that are like, "How should we adjust our marketing with the economic changes?" And things like that, I was like, "Start by assuming you no longer have product-market fit." (laughs) Because you had product-market fit in a different market. It's a different market now, so you have to start over, and, and then hopefully you do, or it's pretty close to it, and you just have to adjust a couple of things, and you could be right back on track. But, like, if you just assume, like, you need to launch a new channel to fix this problem, like, you're gonna be wrong. Because, like, your entire customer base changed, not just the next 10% of customers that you're looking for. (instrumental music)

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 experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Adam Grenier. Adam was head of growth marketing and innovation at Uber, where he basically built their growth marketing infrastructure and the team from the ground up. Then he went on to VP of product and marketing at Lambda School, and most recently, he was VP of marketing at MasterClass. These days, Adam advises companies large and small on growth and marketing strategy. In our conversation, we cover how to decide when to try new and emerging acquisition channels like TikTok, VR, newsletter ads, and how to go about testing them out. We get into the growth CMO role, which is an emerging role that Adam has helped pioneer, and we get into some real talk about burnout and depression and mental health issues that often come with working in tech. This was a really powerful and insightful conversation, and I learned a lot from Adam, both as an operator and as a human. I can't wait for you to hear this episode. And so with that, I bring you Adam Grenier. This episode is brought to you by Whimsical. When I asked product managers and designers on Twitter what software they use most, Whimsical is always one of the most mentioned products, and the users are fanatical. Whimsical is built for collaborative thinking, combining visual, text, and data canvases into one fluid medium. Distributed teams use Whimsical for workshops, white boarding, wire frames, user flows, and even feature specs, and it includes thousands of built-in icons and a rich library of templates. See why product teams at leading companies call Whimsical a game changer. Visit whimsical.com/lenny to have my own templates added to your account when you sign up. That's whimsical.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Coda. Coda's an all-in-one doc that combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps in one place. I actually use Coda every single day. It's my home base for organizing my newsletter writing. It's where I plan my content calendar, capture my research, and write the first drafts of each and every post. It's also where I curate my private knowledge repository for paid newsletter subscribers, and it's also how I manage the workflow for this very podcast. Over the years, I've seen Coda evolve from being a tool that makes teams more productive to one that also helps bring the best practices across the tech industry to life with an incredibly rich collection of templates and guides in the Coda Doc Gallery, including resources from many guests on this podcast, including 3OS, Gokul, and Shishir, the CEO of Coda. Some of the best teams out there, like Pinterest, Spotify, Square, and Uber, use Coda to run effectively and have published their templates for anyone to use. If you're ping-ponging between lots of documents and spreadsheets, make your life better and start using Coda. You can take advantage of a special limited time offer just for our startups. Head over to coda.io/lenny to sign up and get $1,000 credit on your first statement. That's coda.io/lenny to sign up and get $1,000 in credit on your account. Adam, welcome to the podcast.