Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman

It seems like there's a playbook for everything, there's a framework for everything. But the reality is, you have to spend the hours and the time to really understand your customer.

You were the first marketing hire at OpenAI. I believe ChatGPT is the fastest growing product in history. Let me ask you this. A lot of people might be hearing like, "Oh, ChatGPT," it's like, "Why do you need marketing?"

Everyone knew of ChatGPT, but when you clicked one zoom level further, the thing that came up was, "I don't know what to use it for." The work of marketing ended up becoming, creating this sort of use case epiphany where people could say, "I had no idea ChatGPT could do that." A lot of marketing metrics tend to be vanity metrics about the number of clicks that you got, number of views, number of impressions. I think those are all bullshit numbers. What is that experience that you want your customers to come away with when they interact with your brand?

If your advice is, "Don't just copy what other companies do," what should people be doing?

Put together, like, a four-step process that has served me pretty well. The, the first step here is...

(instrumental music) Today, my guest is Krithika Sankaranaman. Krithika was the first marketing hire and VP of marketing at OpenAI, the first marketing hire at Stripe, where she was the only marketing person for three years. She was also an early marketing leader at Retool and at Dropbox. She also did marketing for Android at Google. Currently, she's executive in residence at Thrive Capital, where she supports their portfolio and founders on all things marketing and helps hire early marketing leaders for their startups. In our conversation, we talk through all of the biggest lessons that she has learned about how to market your product from her time at OpenAI, Stripe, Retool, Dropbox and other places, including her four-step diagnostic approach to marketing, her anti-playbook playbook, what B2B companies can learn from consumer marketing, career advice for people looking to get into marketing, and also just what people that don't want to get into marketing should know about marketing to be successful. A big thank you to Kevin Garcia and Kelly Simms for suggesting questions and stories to get into. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of world-class products, including Superhuman, Notion, Linear, Perplexity, and Granola, and more. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com and click Bundle. With that, I bring you Krithika Sankaranaman. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features, and Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform, where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out of the box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytic cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A/B testing flywheel. Eppo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com/lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Airtable Product Central, the unified system that brings your entire product org together in one place. No more scattered tools, no more misaligned teams. If you're like most product leaders, you're tired of constant context switching between tools. That's why Airtable built Product Central after decades of working with world-class product companies. Think of it as mission control for your entire product organization. Unlike rigid point solutions, Product Central powers everything from resourcing, to voice of customer, to road mapping, to launch execution, and because it's built on Airtable's no-code platform, you can customize every workflow to match exactly how your team works. No limitations, no compromises. Ready to see it in action? Head to airtable.com/lenny to book a demo. That's airtable.com/lenny. Krithika, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.