Traditional Marketing Teams Are NO Match for This Cross-Disciplinary Approach | ExperiMENTAL Ep. 1

The Future of Growth Marketing Is Cross-Disciplinary | Sunil Subhedar (Uber, Canva, Anthropic)

Welcome to the very first episode of ExperiMENTAL, the podcast for marketers and data scientists who are done with fluff and ready to go deep.

In this debut episode, host Sundar Swaminathan sits down with Sunil Subhedar, Growth Marketing Lead at Anthropic, and former head of growth at Canva and Uber, to unpack what modern growth marketing actually looks like when you’re building at scale.

You’ll learn:
✔ How to build a growth team that works like a product team
✔ Why the best marketers today think in systems, not channels
✔ The power of cross-functional collaboration with product, data, and engineering
✔ How to align with finance and data science before you run experiments
✔ Real use cases of AI for content, SEO, testing, and ops
✔ Why dashboards are broken and how to fix your reporting mindset

Sunil shares practical frameworks, team design insights, and real lessons from scaling at some of the world’s top tech companies. This is where B2C marketers go to learn what actually works.

🎧 ExperiMENTAL is hosted by Sundar Swaminathan, Head of Data Science at Bounce and former Uber leader. This show is your behind-the-scenes look at how top marketers and data scientists make smarter decisions.

🧠 Expect unfiltered conversations, mental models, and case studies that help you cut waste, build conviction, and grow your B2C business.

📬 Subscribe to the ExperiMENTAL newsletter for deep dives and frameworks: https://experimental.beehiiv.com/

Transcript

Libby: 0:00

It's not just ads and landing pages, but we need to kind of think about how we're actually delivering on that value prop that we're putting out into the market. Customers are really bad at valuing medium to long-term benefits, and so there's a lot that you can actually do with marketing to get them to kind of think about the holistic benefits that they're getting when you. Force people in a room to put stuff down on paper. It becomes pretty obvious, pretty quickly where people disagree or if there is alignment. Let's dig deeper into what is actually holding people back, and why do people feel the price is too expensive?

Sundar: 0:32

Welcome to Experimental, the podcast that cuts through the noise to bring you actionable insights in B2C growth. Marketing and data science. I'm your host, ser, former head of Brand Data Science at Uber and the Mind Behind the Experimental Newsletter. Join me as I talk with industry leaders who have driven growth at companies like Uber, Spotify, and Netflix. We'll uncover the experiments, failures, and breakthroughs that lead to real results now. Let's get experimental. Hey, Libby, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining.

Libby: 1:00

Hi, Sundar. Thanks for having me.

Sundar: 1:01

Super excited to have you. You've had a ton of experience at Caviar Square, DoorDash. Your consulting. Your advising. You've got a lot of great things we can talk about. One of the things that you brought up that I thought was really fascinating is the difference between. Discovery versus optimization marketing. I'd love to just start there. What does, what does that mean? Let's go there.

Libby: 1:21

Yeah, so I think I work now a lot with companies that are pretty small, like C to series B in that ambiguous sort of product market fit, maybe scaling, maybe finding product market fit phase. And what I've found is that there's this, this difference in how most marketers think, especially if you're at a company with a known product, with an audience that knows your product and you're just trying to scale the marketing. That's really what I think of as optimization marketing, and the reason I call it that is you're optimizing, you're trying to figure out how can I adjust creative in certain channels? How can I adjust placements on the website? How can I adjust copy, you know, to really get that incremental gain and start to to grow a little bit more month over month and have that sort of consistent linear or exponential growth. What I find a lot of the times when you're in more of that expiration phase, you have a product, you think you know who the audience is, but you're not really sure how to talk about it, you haven't actually gotten much traction. That's repeatable. Uh, when it comes to marketing, that is a totally different ball game, and that's what I think of as discovery marketing because what you're trying to do is actually discover like an audience for your product and figure out that playbook for, uh, marketing the product. And so sometimes that actually requires. Changing the product based on what you've found in the discovery marketing. But other times it just has to do with how you actually are describing the product, what use cases you're solving for customers. And I find this to be really relevant, especially in like services products, which is a lot of the work that I do and consumer services in particular. Mm-hmm. Because if you think of, you know, a telehealth platform for example, that's providing behavioral health services to a particular niche audience, there's a lot of different problems that. That platform could be solving for a particular customer versus if you think about a t-shirt, there are only so many different ways to describe like what a t-shirt can do for you. And marketers get very creative with that, which I've always find impressive. But that kind of like discovery element isn't as relevant. And so I think the same thing is applicable, you know, in B2B, uh, software businesses and just businesses that have a broader set of use cases, it's, there is this initial phase of just discovering, okay, where is my initial audience? Where can I get some traction? And then you move on to scaling from there.

Sundar: 3:38

Even in going back to the T-shirt example, right? Like would you consider, hey, we need to figure out which channel to use as discovery marketing, or would you consider that more of, again, optimization marketing? I.

Libby: 3:49

Yeah, so I think that the discovery phase is just kind of shorter or longer, I think, depending on how obvious some of your marketing basics are. Mm-hmm. So if you have some of the core positioning and messaging down already and you're really just trying to find a channel, you can run a discovery process sort of to figure out that initial channel, but that usually can be like a little bit faster versus if you're, take the telehealth example, you're really actually trying to figure out the core elements of your marketing basics. Who is the product for. What problem does it solve for them and why is it so much better than the alternative solutions that are out there? And in that instance, I actually usually start with one channel to kind of keep the channel constant and do a lot of experimentation around some of those core elements. So I think they can be applicable to both types of products. But the duration of the discovery typically takes a lot longer when you have more of those variables that you're playing with.

Sundar: 4:42

I'm curious because you, you're calling it discovery versus optimization marketing, but this discovery phase sounds like it's. Extendable to product, basically the entire strategy, like, you know, as a reason. You, you, you, you framed it as discovery marketing.

Libby: 4:55

Yeah, so it's a good question. I think, you know, the work I do is all through the lens of marketing.

Sundar: 4:59

Mm-hmm.

Libby: 5:00

But I think that this is actually a big issue or challenge that companies run into is when you're in the optimization marketing phase. I mean, in general, I'm a big believer. Growth is a team sport and it should never be relegated to the marketing team. But when you're in that optimization phase, there's a lot more than marketing can do on its own. And so marketers who are great at optimization marketing tend to be like channel specialists. Strong experts, you know, they're, they're shared qualities that you need no matter what type of marketing you're doing. But if you're just, you know, optimizing, kind of finding those incremental gains in a channel, maybe launching, you know, your sixth channel, a lot of that comes down to your like, marketing expertise with regards to the channel. Discovery Marketing is a totally different type of thinking. Mm-hmm. And I think this is where a lot of marketers too, have trouble kind of crossing over between the two because discovery marketing does require more of that, like systems thinking brain, and more of that like general manager type of mindset. Because you need to be thinking, you're using marketing to get signals on who your product is for, why it's better than the alternative, some of those things. But obviously that touches a lot of different dimensions of the business. And so you have to be. Comfortable kind of thinking a little bit more broad strokes around, okay, it's not just ads and landing pages, but we need to kind of think about how we're actually delivering on that value prop that we're putting out into the market. And so it does extend into product, into strategy, into ops in some cases, depending on what the business is. And it is very cross-functional in nature. And so the types of experiments that you're running also tend to be. Much fuller stack across the business. Mm-hmm. Uh, and not just sort of piecemeal things within the marketing sphere specifically.

Sundar: 6:41

This seems like a continuous thing that comes up for, for founders, right, who struggle to find product market fit. They focus so much on the product and forget about the other part of the equation, which is the market part, right? So, you know, when you go in and consult and advise, like how are you positioning this discovery marketing to make it. Actually work cross-functionally.

Libby: 7:02

There's a couple of different things. I think the first thing that I always start with is sort of putting down on paper what I call like a use case map. So let's just dump the company's thinking into a structured template. Mm-hmm. Around what problems do we think this product is solving? Who are the customers that actually have that problem and. What are the alternative solutions that they might be utilizing to solve that problem today? And then through that lens, how do you actually articulate the product benefits? And it depends. Sometimes like all of those things are unclear depending on where the company is at. And other times they have a really clear perspective on. Hey, we know that we're solving this problem. We know this audience is the audience that really has that problem, but we just don't actually know where to go from there. Mm-hmm. So that exercise is often quite clarifying.'cause we can define sort of what we know or what we think we know and what we think we don't know. So sometimes I work with them on. We know the problem, but we don't know the audience. So let's go and like test the audience or we know the problem and the audience, but we don't actually know how to position it, what category to use, what language to use. Yeah, exactly. And so again, depending on how many variables are at play, and usually where I start with a company is, okay, what. What marketing are you running today and what's your cac? Okay. How far away is that from the actual CAC that you need to make your funnel work? Mm-hmm. And if you're like 10 x away, you know, you gotta be exploring all of the elements of the playbook. If you're three or four x away, like sometimes you know, you can really make that difference with just positioning and. The kind of funnel experience. And if you're 20% away from your target cap, like you're not in the discovery marketing phase, you actually have something that's working and you just need to optimize and tweak. So I, I kind of use the, like the goals and those top-down targets of, okay, for your business to function, you need to acquire people for a hundred bucks or 50 bucks or a thousand bucks. A lot of times, you know, people are like 10,000 or you know, you're way, way off at the beginning and that's why I think that discovery process is so different.'cause you're looking for these like major step changes, not just these sort of, Hey, in this AB test we had a statistically significant 10% lift on this one variable. Like, that's just not gonna get you the progress that you need. And so I think that that mentality around looking for signals and kind of building your conviction as a company and as a team on, okay, where is our stake in the ground and how can we get more confident as we start to double down?'cause you will have to make bets. That you're not a hundred percent sure about, like you can't rely exclusively on the data in these instances. Mm-hmm. Like you can in optimization marketing. And so that's really what I try to help teams to do is like, let's develop a really structured process. So at each. Kind of step, or each week, each couple of weeks we're making progress against our learning goals and building conviction on, yes, this is, this is what we wanna do. This is the corner of the market. We're gonna win. And we have conviction based on the signals from the tests that we've run so far. It is actually the right path for us to keep going. Now,

Sundar: 9:57

I love the learning goals because this reminds me of just like an experimentation roadmap where you go into thinking, you know, what do I wanna learn instead of what do I want to test? You know, when you're working with these founders and companies and they're like, Hey, we know this problem. That to me is already like a bit of a trap because that's always where some of the assumptions go wrong is like, actually you don't understand the problem. So how do you, whether it's, you know, even through marketing, how do you tease out some of those assumptions and actually get to deeper understanding of the problem?

Libby: 10:25

Yeah, so a couple different things. I mean, one is honestly, when you force people in a room to put stuff down on paper, it becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly how, how, where people disagree or if there is alignment. And so I find just that process alone, like. Having been in startups and worked in startups myself, like, I get it. You're in it. You don't take time to write stuff down. You're so busy, you're moving so fast. But that discipline of like, let's write it down on paper actually, is just so eye-opening for so many companies. So that's kind of step one. And then step two is, let's say we're not sure the problem, I'll use an example of this telehealth company that I've been working with that focuses in the cancer space. When I came in for them, they said, you know, we have a really strong point of view. We really solve problems for people that are in the kind of like early diagnosis phase of their cancer. And I actually took that as a given, this was about a year ago. Mm-hmm. Uh, which now I've learned not to do that. And we started, you know, we started marketing against messaging for that particular segment. Yeah. And then I think what's really critical is whoever's talking to customers in your company, and again, this is why I love services businesses, 'cause there's usually apps of somebody on the phone, like talking to customers all the time. Mm-hmm. You gotta create that connection between. The people talking on the phone and the people like running the product and marketing experiment roadmap. So in this case, we had a clinical team. They're on the phone talking to people, doing the intake calls, doing the consultations, and we had a feedback session with them about a month in and they were saying, oh, actually we have all these people in the survivorship phase who actually are finding a ton of value because. Yes. The people who have recently been diagnosed like need a lot of support, but they're so overwhelmed and they have so many decisions that they're trying to make around their treatment plan. Their, you know, they just got this like incredible bomb dropped on their life of this news that they have cancer. Sometimes it can be hard for them to prioritize getting sort of the holistic support that they need to make it through this experience. Versus once people are in the survivorship phase, now all of a sudden they have this time to like process everything that just happened to them and they're more motivated to actually carve out that space to work one-on-one with a counselor to kind of work through that. And so it was that insight from the clinical team that. Said, wait, we actually don't know the problem that we're we're solving. Mm-hmm. And so then we started running ads with tailored landing pages specific to each stage, and we tested kind of three or four different messages in the ads. I kept the like ad format very consistent, so we weren't introducing that variable, but just trying to test. Different hooks, different messages, speaking to the problems in each specific stage. Mm-hmm. And then a landing page that, you know, aligned with that. And we found like the survivorship CACs were one third of our other segments. Not only because the ads engaged more, but because the conversion from sort of the initial lead generation to enrollment with the counselor was so much higher because of that natural motivation of the segment. Yeah. Um, so that's just, that's just one example of how kind of getting those customer insights, getting some initial results, and then going back to the drawing board and. It seems like this actually isn't working. Is there something that we overlooked or is there something that we thought we knew that maybe we don't? And then kind of reintroducing that into the experiment roadmap can help.

Sundar: 13:36

This is great because like what you are doing for discovery, marketing looks a lot like optimization marketing, right? In terms of, hey, we're keeping the ad format's the same. We're just changing a few copy and we're gonna redirect a new landing page. And yet that. Sort of thinking like escapes founders, I find a lot like, it feels like we gotta redesign the entire funnel. Yeah. Like is that something you, you face often? How do you sort of prevent, let's not boil the ocean, let's you know, like how do you, how do you sort of keep that a little structured?

Libby: 14:05

That's a good question. I'll use another example. So I'm working with this, um, food service thought delivers, um, meals to families. In kind of major cities in New York, and we are, we're working on, they, they sort of did have a, they had a definition of the problem. They had an audience segment. They were going after busy parents, but they had a lot of different opinions on how they should package the service. And so we've been working a lot on the positioning. And so the first thing that I started, I laid out this roadmap for them and I said, all right, this is what we're gonna do. Because of one angle that we had was this idea of like a personal chef, because they were working with personal chefs to prepare, prepare the food. From the beginning, I said I think that that has a, is a really compelling positioning, but I just wanna be clear that your current experience does not actually deliver on probably the expectations of what somebody might have. Mm-hmm. Hey, I'm hiring a personal chef, right? So there are a lot of like nuances we played around with, with like language and category, which I won't get into right now. But to your question, one thing we could have done was just blown the whole thing up right away, right? And we could have said, let's design an end-to-end experience that we think really represents what this category is looking for. Now that's a lot of work. That's a lot of money. It's a lot of time. It's very scary, right? And so what we did instead was, Hey, let's just look for clear signal at top of funnel on which of these positionings is working better and let's all like stack hands and agree. If this personal chef type of messaging wins, like that means that we are going to have to differentiate in other ways. Mm-hmm. On the ops side, on the product side. And so we ran this very structured set of tests with ads, landing pages around the different messaging categories and. The personal show blew the other options out of the water, like 50% better in terms of click-through rates. People were getting into the intake funnel much deeper. There was like so much intrigue, so much curiosity, and so then we had the conviction to say, all right, now let's start kind of moving down the funnel and figuring out how much we need to blow up the experience, if you will. Mm-hmm. And so then we did some testing within the intake and kind of the digital product. That didn't really move the needle. And so now we're sort of going back to the drawing board and thinking about these like bigger swings in terms of mm-hmm. What within the experience we really have to change. But things started happening, like the founders started getting text messages from people he knew, oh, I saw your new ads. Like these are awesome and it makes the service sound so great. And he says, you know, I've been running this business for six years and no one's ever texted me about the ads. Yeah. And so it's all about getting this convic. That's why I use the word conviction. Yeah. The data is never gonna be like entirely conclusive, but I think you have to like build that conviction, because if you're gonna make a big bet in terms of. How much effort you're spending and how much you're changing your actual product experience. You wanna be really sure that the marketing is gonna be able to back that up in the end. So that's, that's how I approach it.

Sundar: 16:54

I love that you use the word curiosity, conviction, because even if you look at the definition of everyone that talks about product market fit, it's always a, this qualitative version. It's like, oh, you know it when you feel at this pool. Um, and yet. You know, everyone is looking for these data-driven signals, but it's actually like this blend of both.

Libby: 17:12

It's both.

Sundar: 17:12

It's both. It's both, right. Yeah. And I

Libby: 17:14

think that's marketing, right? Yeah. Marketing is art and science and I like so firmly believe that. And I think that there's been this interesting trend in marketing in, you know, the last 10 years with digital marketing where. Many marketers have become too sciencey. Mm-hmm. And then there's the, the classic brand marketing, you know, and creative directors. And that's like all art. Mm-hmm. And you know, the reality is like you absolutely need both. And if you're not thinking about both, you're doing it wrong. But yeah, the data alone is like, not. Probably gonna be enough to get you there, but you should be looking at the data also to make sure that your kind of intuition on the art is right.

Sundar: 17:49

Yeah. It's so funny that you, you've said that this is something I've been saying a lot, and this is even true for a data scientist. I think like data scientists have become too sciencey and lost a bit of the art of you. At the end of the day, you are, um, if you're a data science marketer, you're a marketer first and not a data scientist first. And so that's really cool. It's cool to hear you say that too, and experience it. I wanted to. Really quickly touch on, you know, you mentioned if you're like a 20% close to your target cac, it's kind of closer to optimization versus discovery. One of the challenges that I see, especially for early stages, like you don't have a clear understanding of, hey LTV slash what are the CACs you can support? How, yeah. How do you navigate that to say, listen. Is 10,000, for example, 10,000 cac, is it bad or is it bad compared to what you need it to be? Like how do you, how do you navigate that?

Libby: 18:35

Yeah, I mean I think this is where heuristics and rules of thumb can come into play. Like you have your LTV that you're presenting to your investors, and this is another thing I talk to founders a lot about a lot, is they are so, you know, in entrenched in pitching to investors, which is such an important skill as a founder. They then wanna translate that into their marketing. And I'm like, your customers and your investors are just totally different people. And your investors really love your vision and your customers care about the value that you can deliver today. And so I think the same kind of principle applies when it comes to LTV. It's like you have this vision of all these services that you're gonna layer on and all these segments and your LTV is gonna be amazing. And it's like, you know, that's why you're getting the valuation, but like, let's be. Practical. Yeah. Around in the next 12 months based on what you've seen so far, like what LTB do you actually think you can support? And I think this has become honestly, a little bit easier in, in recent years, just given the market and the cash constraints where, mm-hmm. Companies have had to think more pragmatically around their ltac and, and many companies really want to be cashflow positive or a little bit more in charge of their destiny, if you will. And so that's really what I work on is like, and I always just start with a very simple back of the envelope model. Mm-hmm. I think this is something I learned early on in my consulting days, but. People wanna have this like complex LTV, whatever, and I'm like five rows in a spreadsheet, we can pretty much calculate your LTV and then let's just do some sensitivity around that. Okay. You think people are gonna stick around for six months, or in the telehealth instance, they're gonna have 12 sessions. Mm-hmm. You know, what if they have six, what if they have 18? Like let's start to get a sense of the range and so then that can help you back into what a good cat looks like for you. Because what I'm trying to help them with is. Building a funnel that works for them, like this year, not the funnel that works for them, for their five to 10 year venture vision. And those are very different problems to solve. Right?

Sundar: 20:34

Yeah. Uh, wow. So many sound bites there. I mean, right. Just even your, your investors are not your customers. Like, I, I love that. But I mean, the sensitivity on is a really good one too, because it brings up just growth modeling. We'll actually touch on that a bit 'cause I know you've got a, a really great course around that. Something that, you know, on part of this discovery versus optimization, but maybe a bit of a segue is. You mentioned, you know, hiring the smart person who doesn't have the right experience but can figure it out is the exception. And this sounds perfect for this'cause you need someone that has to be able to understand how to run discovery marketing or optimization marketing. Right. Talk me through your thinking there.'cause that that feels like a, a hot take. Everyone feel, you know, says, you know, hire the generalist, hire the scrappy person that can do everything. Yeah. But this is the exact opposite of what, what you were saying.

Libby: 21:20

Yeah. So I think these like hire the generalist or hire the smart person. Like sometimes that actually is what you need. But I think the problem is that, and especially with marketers, and I'll talk about. Maybe like a marketing leader and then were and junior marketers or ICS on your team. I had an old mentor years ago, Sarah Clemens, who was my boss at Pandora, the music company and mouth jewelry company back in like 2015, and she had this development philosophy around people of. You wanna have one foot in something you're really awesome at. So you have like the confidence and the skillset, and then you wanna put one foot in something that is new for you, and that's the best way to learn. Because if you have, if you're too comfortable too, then you get complacent. If it's too much to learn at once, like you fail, right? Mm-hmm. So it's that principle that's like stuck with me for the last decade. But I think when it comes to early stage marketing, I break it down a little bit more discreetly into thinking about what is the role that you're hiring someone to do? Mm-hmm. What is the business that you are operating within? What's the audience you're marketing to? What's your business model? And then what stage of company are you at? And I think where I personally fell down when I was leading marketing at a seed stage company and like scaling my team, was really underestimating that that stage learning curve existed at all. And so what I find is that if you hire somebody who needs to ramp up on two out of three of those buckets. Mm-hmm. So let's say if you're hiring a performance marketer who needs to be really good at. You know, all different, uh, you know, wide variety of, of channels. Really good at analysis. Like knows how to set up their own MarTech staff, like those types of things. Let's say you've defined the criteria for the role, but they've never worked in a services business, for example. Mm-hmm. They've only marketed t-shirts and they don't understand anything about a marketplace and you're working in a marketplace and they've never been early stage. That's like a lot for somebody to learn. So I think that's, that's one mistake I see hiring managers make is they really like discount. That stage is a learning curve. Mm-hmm. You've done. If you're coming and doing that early stage and you're a one person shop with like no budget and no agencies or you know, it just might look totally different. It's a lot to learn of like, how do you actually prioritize your time and what do you work on? Mm-hmm. And then similarly, I also see people not actually to clearly define the role. And here's where I think like. Generalists, scrappy generalists might be what you need if you think about the skillset of the role that you're hiring, not the title. Mm-hmm. Marketing titles mean like a hundred different things at every company. Yeah. So if you're hiring a lifecycle marketer or a VP of marketing, like that title could mean a number of different things at different companies. So really think about what is the skill that you want, and this is where, if you're thinking about. A discovery marketer, the skillset that you need is this sort of like systems thinker, marketer, somebody that has enough exposure to product marketing, to brand marketing, to growth. Marketing really understands how these components fit together and has a really like disciplined kind of process around how they think about learning more about what works and what doesn't. And has had the experience of like building a playbook from scratch. So if you define that as the role, you might actually go and hire a generalist because like that's the person that has those skills. Mm-hmm. But I think really spending time to define like what are the skills that this role requires and make sure that people have the experience on that. As well as one of those other two learning buckets, then a smart person can always ramp up on one. Those are some of the pitfalls that I see people making.

Sundar: 24:47

Yeah, and, and maybe one of the skill sets that does get discounted is the ability to push back. I. Right, and I think just with your experience, like, you know, I'm sure Caviar, square, DoorDash all have really, like they're competitive in a good way, as in you're working, interacting with some of the smartest people, and so I think that forces you to learn how to present better, blah, blah, blah. A challenge that I see a lot is you hire an early stage marketer as a founder, and then you just steamroll them. Because you're the founder. So you know, to your point, it's not just skillset from the actual technical skillset, there are also soft skill sets that you have to be hiring for too.

Libby: 25:24

Right? Totally. You know, a lot of founders that I work with, it's their first time hiring a marketer. Mm-hmm. So they're like, I don't really know who I should be hiring. And then they're doubting themselves from the beginning of. Did I hire the right person? And so then that sort of sets up the dynamic to be like that from the beginning because the founder isn't actually confident that they made the right hire in the first place. And so I think this is where if you spend a little bit more time really thinking about like, what do I think I need? It's just, it's kind of like an experiment in and of itself. What do I think I need? Then when I go and interview, I sort of validate my initial hypotheses around like, this is the skillset I'm looking for. These are the things that are important. And then you can have a lot more confidence when that person comes into the business of, okay, I believe that I made the right hire for the business based on where I am today. And you can hopefully set up that on equal footing. But to your point, the person needs to also have the skillset and the comfort mm-hmm. To be able to manage and navigate those conversations. And. It needs to be a person that's used to not just taking orders.'cause I think that's something that I experienced the first time I started reporting to someone that wasn't my own function, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It's like, oh, I have to drive this entirely myself. And so if, if that's part of, I think the skillset is like, have they been in that, that type of relationship before where they've actually been responsible for the whole roadmap. Because you can't go to your founder boss for marketing advice, just, but if you have a. VP of marketing or A CMO that you're reporting to, you actually can go to them for marketing advice. So it's a very different type of relationship.

Sundar: 26:46

Yeah, yeah. And so skillset, you know, business model and stage, right? So stage. Yeah. I think, yeah, I think we've talked about skillset a lot. Um, so talk to me a little bit more about business model and why you can't just transfer across business models.

Libby: 27:00

Yeah. So I think. You can if you've done the stage in the role.

Sundar: 27:04

Yeah. Fair. But I think,

Libby: 27:05

yeah, but I, I think that in marketing in particular, I find this to be. More challenging because it comes back to my like T-shirt telehealth example that I'll come to time and time again is I think there's a lot of nuance and difference in how you market different types of products, not only like the type of audience that you're marketing to. So most one that most people think about is like consumer marketing versus B2B. Uh, you know, I want somebody with consumer marketing experience and that usually holds, but you know, even within B2B, there's very different types of marketing and very different types of business models. So if you're in a. Product led growth motion versus a sales led motion. The marketing is gonna be very different depending on what you're doing there. And I think if you're marketing a service versus you're marketing a, a packaged good, that marketing is gonna be really different. I worked with the founder once who came from a, like a hardware. Her first business was a hardware business, and then she founded a marketplace business, uh, which didn't end up working out, and now she's doing another hardware business. But it was so interesting working with her. Having been a marketplace person myself is like the marketplace. Is the product. Mm-hmm. The product is like changing all the time based on the market what's on the marketplace, versus if you build a piece of hardware, you spend like two years building that hardware and then you launch it. That's actually terrifying to me, by the way. Like you can't just, you know, iterate once it's live. Yeah. It's like, no, you have a physical product and so I think the way that you market that is totally different. Right. With a marketplace, you have all this kind of like. And space to kind of think about it and evolve the product in response to the market. And if you're selling a piece of hardware or a t-shirt, like you have the product, like you just don't have as many levers and so marketing that you're gonna be doing. It's pretty different. It's very emotionally based. You know, you're thinking about the influencers that are promoting you, you're thinking about kind of the cache that you can attach to that brand. All of that becomes really important, really early on. Whereas with the marketplace, those things aren't as relevant at the beginning because you're really just trying to figure out like what problems your marketplace solves and, and get the right supply and you know, so there, I think those are some of the nuances that I see is like. The comfort with ambiguity is pretty different for somebody who works in more of a service-based business versus somebody who has the pro the physical product and is kind of putting that out into the world.

Sundar: 29:27

Yeah. And maybe just to, to wrap it all up, go through the, the challenges with like different stages, right? So like, you know, why is that complexity there?

Libby: 29:36

If I think about like speed versus series A, for example.

Sundar: 29:39

Mm-hmm.

Libby: 29:40

Seed stage, you're almost always in this discovery phase. Yeah. So if you're bringing on any marketer full-time, they need to be able to think in that discovery mindset, unless you're a founder who themselves is going to be able to kind of lead that strategy and you need somebody to like execute a bunch of the groundwork. But yeah, it's all discovery, it's all being scrappy, it's all low fidelity experiences. You know, you're trying to spend the least amount of money to get the highest amount of signal. Then as you move into Series A often it's still a lot of discovery, I find. Um, but now you're doing like discovery at scale. Mm-hmm. And you usually have growth figures attached to it. And so kind of understanding impact and how big of an impact things can have and having kind of the intuition around. To spend your time relative to the impact that you can have, but time allocation also super important. And then once you get into series B, now, you usually have a playbook. You're kind of diversifying the playbook, you're getting a little bit more into that optimization. Marketing. You might have, you know, more discovery. It could be a little bit of a mix. Mm-hmm. Um, but at that point, yeah, you're trying to kind of take your business to the next level. And so often you're looking for. For a marketing leader who has more of that like multi-channel experience Yeah. Can think about how you actually scale, um, how you do things efficiently, how you get all your channels working together. You might be putting in more rigorous measurement at that point. And so the problems that you're solving are, you know, tend to be. A little bit more on the optimization gap.

Sundar: 31:07

Yeah, so I mean, obviously different strategy, like you said, discovery versus self optimization, but also just very different resources, right? Like Right, exactly. Just how scrappy you can be and what you need to to do. So, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I think you and I have worked at the different stages, but just to, just for everyone else, just to, to walk through that, going from. You know, when you got acquired by Square and then DoorDash, did you have to rediscover or was it a little bit more optimization? Like, what did that look like when you got acquired and become part of a new brand? What does that marketing look like?

Libby: 31:36

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, at the time that I was at Caviar, we were probably like 150 million in revenue, and our growth had really slowed down. Mm-hmm. Because of how competitive the category got. And so I think part of our challenge was we weren't really sure what problem we were solving. Yeah. Like we knew that we needed to grow. We knew that we needed to. Grow more efficiently. But at the time that I took over growth marketing, the thing that I really doubled down on was acquiring diners through our restaurant partners, because that was the kind of advantage, the competitive advantage that we had at the time was we had these exclusive restaurant partners. They wanted to market caviar. They had a bunch of diners, were interested in ordering delivery from them, and that was something that we had that. You know, DoorDash before they acquired us, didn't. And so a big part of what we focused on was just sort of more discovery, I guess, in that channel of mm-hmm. How can we maximize the value there? Once we got acquired, then it was more, how can we just like apply the DoorDash playbook to this business? And so I think it was a lot more optimization marketing and, and DoorDash had just built a much more rigorous muscle around paid marketing that we. Didn't have the resourcing, frankly, to do. And so we ended up integrating the products on the backend and like re-skin them on the front end and all of the technical work that we had done to like make our, that like restaurant traffic much more efficient. Mm-hmm. Basically got erased overnight. And then we had to like fill that hole with paid marketing. So it was about more of like adopting the DoorDash playbook? Yeah. Just 'cause they were so much more scaled, so much bigger, had all these different resources. It's like, how can we take advantage of these new resources that we have and kind of redefine our playbook accordingly?

Sundar: 33:22

Man, I, I think we could just spend so much time on, you know, going to Square then DoorDash and what that experience is like. But something that I thought was very cool that you, we talked about before, price. Is important, but not a real barrier. And I feel like this is counter to everything you read. I mean, I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, but like that is, yeah, I, I mean that is such a unique perspective and I love that. Like, let's, let's explore that.

Libby: 33:45

Okay. So when I'm. Working on these like experiment roadmaps with companies and you know, to your point, experimentation is core to optimization and discovery marketing. But when I'm thinking about the experiment roadmaps, particularly within a discovery marketing context, where I always start is like, what is our belief about the customer? Mm-hmm. And now how can we go and test if that is true? So for example, I was working with an allergy clinic and we were trying to understand what are. The barriers to getting people to actually come and meet with somebody with an allergist for the first time. And so one of our beliefs was people are very distrustful of new solutions, like people who are, have been, you know, battling allergies for a long time. They've tried all these different things. Nothing is providing long lasting impact. The solution that this company was selling was an out-of-pocket solution that had a high price tag. And so one of the beliefs or the barriers that kept coming up in our conversation was like, well, it's just too expensive and that's fine. And that that might also be true, like price may be getting in the way. But my point is, how are you gonna solve that? You're not gonna drop the price. Mm-hmm. Like you don't wanna sell a different product like this is, this is the unique solution that you have in the market. And so what are the other ways we can think about price as a barrier? And I think it's like. Price is just, you know, a number associated with value. Mm-hmm. So you can increase the perceived value. And that's a lot of the work that I think is just much more actionable for most companies than thinking about price, especially again, in this discovery phase. And so we really focused on, okay, how do you actually build more trust and intrigue and motivation earlier on in the funnel? How do you, how do you prove to them that this isn't just another. Solution that they're gonna try and be disappointed by. How do you convince them that allergies are actually a medical problem, that have a medical solution and it's not something you have to struggle with and kind of have this like moderate level of pain during allergy season and you know, hit the clarets in every day. And so those things, you know, you can build sort of the perceived value of the solution in advance. And then by the time that you hit people with price, you're like, oh, that makes sense. A lifelong solution to my allergies that cost me a thousand bucks. Well over the duration of 10 years, and like all that over the counter medicine that I was building and all that discomfort that I've kind of like been ignoring my whole life. That seems pretty reasonable. Yeah. It just comes down to what are the things that you can control and, and let's focus on those. And I find with consumer services, and I think this is especially true in healthcare, uh, where I've been doing a lot more work recently, customers are really bad at valuing medium to long term benefits. You know, and so there's a lot that you can actually do with try to do with marketing to get them to kind of. Think about the holistic benefit that they're getting, not just the, you know, check that they're paying today and how painful that might be. And that's where really where you can motivate more change.

Sundar: 36:38

Yeah, and, and you know, this actually resonates a lot with my experience with even consulting. Like if you have someone reach out to you because they perceive that you can fix their problem, price was like, you know, it's still a factor, but it was rarely like they were gonna be ticky-tacky versus if someone. Believes, like you can't solve it for them, they were gonna haggle you. And so there's, there's interesting that like, I, I just love the way you phrase it, which is like, you know, it's actually kind of an excuse for customers, so then it's Excuse completely. Yeah, yeah. It's easy to be like, ah, it's just too expensive, but there's something deeper expensive. So in that example, right where I, I think it was maybe the allergy company, but like, did they already set the price when you had joined or, you know, is that something they asked you to work on? Like, you know, how do founders come up with the price really, I guess.

Libby: 37:22

Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm no pricing expert by any means. Right. So I usually don't do too much deep work on that. Okay. But what I help my companies think about is I think the price, the importance of the price also depends on how you're purchasing. Yeah. Yeah. So if you're trying to get something, to buy something on your website for 500 bucks without ever talking to a human, that's like very different than. Getting somebody to come into a clinic and talk to a doctor and then buy a couple thousand dollars solution. Mm-hmm. And so, especially if you're working in more of like, almost like a B2B type funnel, but for consumers and you have the opportunity to talk to someone. Mm-hmm. That's where I think you can like build a lot more value. Doing all of that digitally does tend to be difficult. And so I do think there's like a price cap of like, it might just be too. From a website. Yeah. I focus less on like the specific pricing number and more on just, I know that when you talk to customers they say, I'm not doing it'cause of the price, but like there's something else there. Yeah. So let's dig deeper into what is actually holding people back and why. Why do people feel the price is too expensive? Yeah. Price as an answer. And when you go in survey, customers like, yeah, 70% of them might say, oh, it's the price, but that's just a convenient. Like, they're not actually thinking that deeply around, like why they won't, don't wanna do it. Right. And so that's where I really push is like, how can we get deeper into the customer psychology, the mentality, their behaviors, uh, and start to kind of influence and change relative to the price that you have out in the market.

Sundar: 38:51

Yeah. And that's, that's a really good way to, to position it as like. You know, the products perceived, I mean, actual value is the same, right? But the perceived value through just digital only touchpoints versus digital and then a human mm-hmm. All of a sudden goes up, right? Mm-hmm. And so that I think is, is really go cool for founders to take away is it might just be just your funnel, right? You don't have to change your product or lower the price of your product. You have to change. How do you introduce perceived value throughout the funnel? Yeah,

Libby: 39:20

yeah. And this was something I was working with a functional medicine company and we were doing a lot of experimentation on audience segments, use cases, and we took that same approach that I mentioned with the food company of kind of like. Building some conviction with the kind of top to middle of funnel and then needing to figure out how to deliver on the experience. The founder ended up making a massive change on price related to a number of, of things even outside of the work she and I were doing together. And then we realized though, like these things work in tandem, right? So if you're selling sort of like a $5,000 program versus a $1,000 program, now you actually have to think about your, your funnel entirely differently way that you're. Messaging the product, the way that you're communicating to customers throughout the experience. So we kind of like built enough conviction that the higher price points segment was the one that you wanted to go after, but then we did have to go back and like rework some of the actual funnel and the way that we were delivering on that because of the price. So they are definitely inter interdependent.

Sundar: 40:20

Yeah. Yeah. Bit of a pivot. Let's talk about the first week of lockdown. Oh yes. Oh my gosh. Um, I, it sounds like there was a lot going on then, so just, just Totally, yeah, go ahead.

Libby: 40:31

I can't believe this was almost five years ago, but I

Sundar: 40:33

know, yeah. I mean,

Libby: 40:34

obviously it was like a, just a crazy time in the world for everyone. I was living in New York City where I still am at the time, and, you know, I think the New Yorker mentality with, so I was working at DoorDash. We had a lot of, uh, coworkers in the Bay Area. They had started working from home. You know, COVID had kind of like hit the West coast first, quote unquote, although it was all. I remember my boss called me and she was like, you have to start work working from home. Like your whole team is going to the office because like you're going to the office still. This was like a day before lockdown. I'm like, we live in New York City. Nobody has space in their apartment to work from home. You know, everyone wants to come to the office. She's like, you gotta, like, you gotta work from home. So that was May, maybe Monday, like Tuesday, it was, you know, everything shut down. City was locked down. Our entire customer support team in the Philippines went offline because they went under lockdown and you know, the internet access for people to do their work from home. So I was working day shift on like caviar marketing, trying to adjust. Everything. And the experience based on lockdown safety was obviously a huge concern. Mm-hmm. And how we were messaging around that. The op side was equally insane. Literally overnight, our, our charts just went from like this to like massive step change. Mm-hmm. New diner numbers I thought I'd never see is just like insane changes to the business. So I'm working night shift on the phones, working support. Everyone from like corporate signed up for their support shifts. Yeah, we just launched Carbone, which is this exclusive bougie restaurant in New York. Again, we thought we never ever get them on delivery. There was so much demand, but there it got shut down three times by the cops because of the lines of the drivers of the drive outside for the food. But then the drivers didn't have a way to cancel their order in the app, and so they were, we had these like just massive queue of just per bone tickets. So I'm just like going through, you know, canceling all the carbon tickets, just totally insane. And then the next day I am making my bed and I find a bug on the bed and I go into the living room. We had, we had only been living in New York a year, so bed bugs were not on my radar. And I said to my husband, who was working from the living room, oh, I found this in our bed, and it still. Saw in the mirror, his computer Googling, like, what does a bed bug look like? And then all of a sudden it clicked that we were in lockdown with bed bugs and I just like collapsed onto the floor sobbing. Like, what are they gonna do? We're trapped in here with the bugs. And we couldn't have anyone come into the building. Like we weren't allowed to have vendors. Yeah. Building. So I went across the street. I was living on third Avenue at the time, also around the corner from the hospital. So it's just like constant, a. Go to the little hardware store across the street. I go in, I remember, I remember this was before we knew like we were supposed to be wearing masks and stuff too. Mm-hmm. So I remember this old man who owned the store and was like, thank you so much for being open. And he, I, he looked at me dead serious and said, well, it was a choice between my community and my life. I chose my community and then handed. I proceeded to go back to the apartment. We just assembled our bed, sprayed it down, found the bedbugs. I mean, they were everywhere. Yeah. Uh, sprayed it down with the killer. Took my clothes steamer and like steamed all of the wooden slack, which bought us about two to three weeks where we didn't see the bugs. And then by that time we were like allowed to have a vendor in the building, but we had to get extremities three times to get rid of them. That was how bad the infestation was. And then, of course, you know, three hours later I'm sitting at my desk. One foot from my bed working cone support tickets. Yeah, and just like, what is life? This is so crazy. I have to get out of the bug bug. We just, were there in the apartment with the bugs and my husband comes think the bugs are our friends. It's okay. We just have to accept them. They're not it.

Sundar: 44:35

I, uh, figure out

Libby: 44:35

how to, how to deliver Fuji Hamburgers to all the New Yorkers who are, you know, missing restaurants.

Sundar: 44:41

You can obviously only laugh at it in hindsight, but it's also funny that you've got a story like that.'cause I think a lot of people that work at companies like DoorDash or Uber have these crazy stories. And I actually find like that's kind of the magic is the stuff that we were. Thrown into Uber, had to do the same thing. You figure

Libby: 44:58

everything out.

Sundar: 44:59

Yeah, yeah. You just figure something out. Like, you know, our support tickets like overnight, quadruple for some reason. And like the entire, I was at the DC office at the time and like the DC office had just signed up for ships and there was like this leaderboard of how many tickets, you know, you like, like this is really cool stuff. So just thanks for sharing another example. I know. Not the, yeah, not the greatest. Set of circumstances, but still, it's probably cool to have experienced something like, you know, carbon's gotta line out the door and you know, you're a part of it or you Yeah, totally. It's a, it's a cool experience. It

Libby: 45:29

was, it was such a weird, weird time. Right? Yeah. Because so many people were in situations like that because of what was happening in the pandemic and you know, obviously healthcare workers and like people are doing those very serious things. Yeah, of course. But from a business perspective, there were some businesses that just had these massive COVID booms and then I had friends. We were in the opposite where their businesses were just shut down. Yeah. So people were either just completely chilling or working like three times harder than they've ever worked, you know? Yeah. And then against the backdrop of this, just like complete global instability. And it's definitely a crazy time

Sundar: 46:00

for sure. Yeah. And, and I think being part of marketing during that time is also crazy. Like you said, like you had to talk about, I mean obviously product and ops were nuts, but like marketing around safety and like how do you strike the balance between do this, but like. Be safe, but you know, it's there. It's, it was quite a lot of mental exercise and I think like lot, you know, kind of one of these, like, I would say quote war times that you learn a lot during, right. That you can then totally, you know, extrapolate to the rest of your career, which is really awesome. We're almost out of time, but I would love to just hear a little bit more about what you're working on. You've got just a, a host of things, so. Talk me through what's, what's going on in in Libby's world?

Libby: 46:36

Yeah. So I spend most of my time working directly with startup. I take on one fractional client at a time where I'm really spending like 15 to 20 hours of my time doing strategy through execution for them. Mm-hmm. And then with other companies, I take a little bit more of an advising role, so that's. You know, great for companies that either have a little less to spend or have some people in house that can already execute. Mm-hmm. And I can come in, come in and kind of architect this discovery marketing. So I've, I've built this growth bootcamp that I do with a lot of companies to kind of kick off our. Engagements where it's a, a series of four structured workshops from kind of taking them through these foundational components of figuring out your discovery playbook, building out that roadmap. That's actually my favorite thing to do is that just like initial kind of learning and, and discovery and roadmapping phase of companies. So I'm always taking on new clients for that and kind of helping people to apply some the things we talked about in this podcast. Mm-hmm. And then I have a substack called where Art meets science. So all about kind of finding this balance of art and science and marketing. So put out content there. And then, yeah, I teach a class on Maven about growth modeling. So that's particularly for marketing leaders who are trying to improve their kind of analytical and quantitative skills and really orient around what decisions will have the most impact. And I also talk a. Executive communication and how you can use your quantitative growth model to actually get buy-in, build credibility with stakeholders, kind of set up your relationships with your CEO, your head of sales, your CFO, whoever it might be. Yeah. Um, because I, I have seen all too many times marketers just get, you know, in those conversations because they're not coming to the table with the information that the stakeholders need. And yeah, there's kind of this translation gap sometimes between marketing and the rest of. That's the best class in.

Sundar: 48:28

Yeah. Yeah. Well, so I'll definitely share the link to your newsletter. And I just love the way the title of it, it's a, it's an equation, it's a math equation. Yes. So I, I won't, I won't share it, but it's, it's very cool.

Libby: 48:39

It's so funny. I feel like people, I don't know. I, I have been wanting to start my newsletter forever. Yeah. And last winter I was like, I'm just gonna do it. And I was ready to launch, but I didn't have a name. And I, I came up with a name and I texted a few friends and I was like, is this too nerdy? And people were like, no. The people who get it will get it. Yeah. And this would be great. So yeah. I'm glad that you, you like it. And obviously as the data scientist, you understand that equation.

Sundar: 49:04

Yeah, it's very, it's very cool. Um, I would love to like just learn a little bit more about bootcamps. You called them, right? The four boot camps. Yeah. So what are the four sort of modules that you, you walk through or three or four, whatever they're.

Libby: 49:15

So basically it's, uh, I usually do it over the course of a month where we do one sort of session per month. So the first one that I typically start with is that use case mapping that I was, uh, discussing earlier on the podcast where we kind of lay out what do we know? Mm-hmm. What problem are we solving? Who's the audience? What are we positioning again? So usually start there. The second section, we typically get more into like goals and growth model, so really trying to understand the questions around like what is our target C that they don't already know and mm-hmm what are the levers that we're playing with and how far off target are we so that we can kind of align on, hey, this is our rate limiting step. This is kind of the area that we wanna focus on in some instances that we're gonna focus on the cap number out of the gate, and other instances we might be focused on conversion rate or some other input metric. So that session is kind of all about the metrics. And then the, the third session, we do kind of a, a divergent, uh, brainstorming exercise around what are our customer beliefs, how do we translate those into hypotheses that we wanna test, and let's start ideating on experiments that we can run. We're really trying to hone in on kind of the core focus areas for where we wanna start with the discovery playbook. Mm-hmm. And then the fourth session we actually build, I, well, I do a bunch of homework in between the sessions, but come to the table with, based on everything we talked about, this is how I would prioritize the roadmap. And then we go through, um, my growth sprint kind of process, which is the actual kind of weekly cadence that I use to run the discovery marketing. So, or bunch rituals associated with that. I have like agendas and templates and use. So in that fourth session, we're really thinking about how do we actually apply everything that we've discussed and start implementing in this more structured process and experimentation with.

Sundar: 51:03

Yeah, I love it. I love that they build on each other. And so, you know, last question, just in case a founder wants to reach out, what types of founders and companies do you generally work with?

Libby: 51:11

Yeah, so my focus is, you know, speed to series A. Sometimes I do have some Series B clients that are going through big pivots, so sometimes I go that big, but really focused on consumer services. So I do a lot of health tech. I do a lot of food that based my background, consumer subscription marketplaces, you know, anything where you have that broader range of use cases that you're trying to figure out, uh, really which problems do you solve. And typically the range of, kind of like in-house marketing resources depends. So sometimes you've got a couple junior marketers. Sometimes people have just exited their head of marketing, need somebody to come in and kind of reset things. Uh, other times I work with a more junior head of marketing and really coach them up. So that really depends. But yeah, feed series A Consumer services, that's my sweet spot.

Sundar: 51:56

Okay, and last question for my own personal thing, 'cause I've got a LinkedIn poll about this. Okay. If a company is not a B2B, is it a B2C or is it consumer? Like, what do you call it? Do you call it B2C Tech? Do you call it consumer tech? What do you call it? Does it matter?

Libby: 52:11

I call it consumer, but I don't think it matters. The one that I try to avoid is B2C.'cause I feel like that has like certain connotations around e-commerce. Yeah. And is like a little bit more narrow, but I usually call it just consumer.

Sundar: 52:28

Okay. And then just the follow up is that, is E-commerce not a part of B2C? Or is e-commerce?

Libby: 52:34

It's, it's a subset

Sundar: 52:35

of, okay, so this

Libby: 52:37

is, I find, I, I run into this problem a lot. I'm like, oh, I do consumer. And people are like, great. I have this friend with a t-shirt company. And I'm like, no, not that kind of consumer. Yeah, I do, like, I don't do e-commerce, I don't do like physical products, you know, I do like digital consumer. Consumer services, consumer technology. Yeah. But I think, yeah, consumer in my mind is like the parent term and then there are these sort of sub-categories within it.

Sundar: 53:00

Okay, great. So I think, yeah, I mean I think, I've been trying to figure this out. I think consumer tech is where I've landed. Um. Yeah, I think that's fair. Perfect. Yeah. Well, cool. Libby, this has, this has been awesome. You, you just had so many things that you've shared that I think are really helpful. I mean, I really, again, love the discovery versus optimization and just like all of your frameworks are really great. Um, so I just wanted to thank you for, for your time. This has been really fun.

Libby: 53:23

Yeah, thanks for having me on. Yeah. And can't wait to listen.

Sundar: 53:26

Absolutely. Okay.

Libby: 53:27

Alright, thanks. Thank you.

Sundar: 53:29

Thanks for tuning into experimental. If today's insights sparked new ideas or made you feel like a smarter marketer, consider leaving a review on your preferred podcast platform to really help support the show. For more in-depth discussions and resources, visit experimental.beehive.com. Until next time, be curious and stay experimental.