The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway)

... from 2010 to 2020, we had the golden years of deterministic matching, where, you know, it was very easy to run an ad and understand with precision who installed the app. Maybe you didn't know their name, but you actually would know their IDFA and you could tie that to their PII. You can't do that anymore. So what that means is, like, these ad networks are becoming more complex, sophisticated, and interesting right at the same time that it's harder for marketers to really understand how they're spending money. And, and so I, like, I'm, I'm paying a lot of attention to, like, how marketers make decisions with probabilistic data, because most of the work that I'm doing now is actually saying, "Well, given that we don't have determinist data about a per- person audience or where somebody came from, how can I find other information that will create a model for 30% of the population? And we can use that to extrapolate to 100."

(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 Austin Hay: Austin is one of the smartest people in the world on the field of MarTech, AKA Marketing Technology. He's advised companies like Notion, Airbnb, Walmart, Postmates, Robinhood, even Peet's Coffee and Mars on their MarTech strategy and tactics. He's currently head of Marketing Technology at Ramp. Before that, he was VP of Business Operations at Runway. Before that, he was VP of Growth at mParticle, and the fourth employee at the unicorn Branch Metrics. He's also a teacher at Reforge on this very topic of MarTech. In our conversation, Austin explains what exactly is MarTech, how it fits into your growth organization, when you need to hire a MarTech person, and what to look for, plus his favorite interview questions, also his favorite tools, frameworks, team structures, and emerging platforms that he's most excited about. This episode is for anyone who's responsible for growth and is curious about ways to optimize your approach and how marketing technology fits into that. Enjoy this episode with Austin Hay after a short word from our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by OneSchema, the embeddable CSV importer for SaaS. Customers always seem to want to give you their data in the messiest possible CSV file, and building a spreadsheet importer becomes a never ending sink for your engineering and support resources. You keep adding features to your spreadsheet importer, but customers keep running into issues. Six months later, you're fixing yet another date conversion edge case bug. Most tools aren't built for handling messy data, but OneSchema is. Companies like Scale AI and Pave are using OneSchema to make it fast and easy to launch delightful spreadsheet import experiences, from embeddable CSV import to importing CSVs from an SFTP folder on a recurring basis. Spreadsheet import is such an awful experience in so many products. Customers get frustrated by useless messages like, "Error on line 53," and never end up getting started with your product. OneSchema intelligently corrects messy data so that your customers don't have to spend hours in Excel just to get started with your product. For listeners of this podcast, OneSchema's offering a $1,000 discount. Learn more at oneschema.co/lenny. 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's 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. (instrumental music) Austin, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.