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How to Align Product and Marketing at Your Startup | Andrei Vlasov
31 Plays16 days ago
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The Efficient Spend Podcast helps start-ups turn media spend into revenue. Learn how the world's top marketers manage their media mix to drive growth!
In this episode of The Efficient Spend Podcast, Andrei Vlasov, growth leader and hybrid marketer, explores how blending paid marketing with product strategy creates sustainable growth. Andrei shares lessons from scaling acquisition across multiple channels, the importance of cross-functional collaboration, and aligning teams around ROI-driven metrics. He also dives into building effective YouTube influencer programs and why sharing insights across teams unlocks greater performance.
About the Host: Paul is a paid marketing leader with over a decade of experience optimizing marketing spend at venture-backed startups. He's driven $250M + in revenue through paid media and is passionate about helping startups deploy marketing dollars to drive growth.
About the Guest: Andrei Vlasov is a growth and marketing leader with over 15 years of experience across paid acquisition, product, and lifecycle. He’s led full-funnel growth at companies like Hover, Jam.dev, and Goodwall, driving millions of users and scaling cross-functional teams. Andrei now helps startups blend performance marketing with product strategy to unlock sustainable, ROI-driven growth.
VISIT OUR WEBSITE: https://www.efficientspend.com/
CONNECT WITH PAUL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulkovalski/
CONNECT WITH ANDREI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrei-vlasov08/
EPISODE LINKS:
https://hover.to/about/
https://jonahberger.com/books/contagious/
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/youtube-stats
https://influencermarketinghub.com/cpm-calculator/
Recommended
Transcript
Auditing Decision-Making Inputs
00:00:00
Speaker
I think a good actionable tip for for anybody, whether they're on the product or marketing side, is to audit yourself and think in a given week, the decisions that I'm making, the tasks that I'm doing, what are the inputs that go behind that task? If I'm a channel manager and I am responsible for creating paid creative, what are the inputs that go into that creative? Is it the recent performance on Google? Or am I getting insight from product that informs the creative?
00:00:29
Speaker
Am I using competitor research? Am I using different data points from the product team? And maybe similarly on the product team, when I'm making a decision about a feature to add, Am I only looking at product research, what's happening in the funnel?
00:00:44
Speaker
Am I also taking inputs from response rates on different messaging ads and and things like that? So for the synergy to happen, you're right, it's probably different in each organization. But if you're sitting within an organization, you can practice some self-awareness and say, am I using kind of a diversified set of inputs to make these decisions on a day-to-day basis?
Andre's Career Journey and Holistic Marketing
00:01:13
Speaker
Andre, welcome to the show. Thanks, Paul. Please call me. I'm excited to chat with you today. I'd love to kind of kick things off. You're very much a hybrid marketer, right? You have the paid marketing experience. You've been in growth marketing roles at a ah number of different startups, but now you've recently moved into more of this hybrid role where you're planning a little bit more in in product.
00:01:35
Speaker
Can you talk to me a little bit about what that evolution looks like and what maybe got you interested in the paid marketing side of things and how that has kind of transitioned and adjusted over time as you've developed your career? Yeah, absolutely.
00:01:52
Speaker
So I do consider myself being more of a generalist. It turns out it's called things gross. And have experience across very early stage startups and some more mature companies, mostly in consumer tech.
00:02:06
Speaker
My journey in growth started back in, I think, 2017. I had some previous experience in marketing, the more like the brand and comms side of things, but I really started diving into growth like back then when I joined one of the startups.
00:02:25
Speaker
and And I think that like a lot of the startups, they have, when they think about growth, they think about acquisition. This is like from my perspective, like growth is of course much more than just acquisition, but like your, I think, stereotypical startup founder thinks about acquisition in the first place.
00:02:46
Speaker
So, and this was the immediate need the company I was at back then. And i started working on paid user acquisition across different channels, you know, your typical Facebook, Google, Apple search, those things, but also tapping into influence marketing, ciliates and some other strategies.
00:03:09
Speaker
So I think to answer your question, just came from that immediate need of the company. And we you know we need to feel our growth for acquisition. So that's where resources and budgets were put in.
Evolution to Holistic Marketing Strategy
00:03:25
Speaker
Sure. I think, you know, starting on the the paid side, you kind of become addicted to that process of acquiring customers. And it's such a fun feeling to launch a campaign and then watch leads, installs, like things come in, you're like, wow, I am i am growing this thing.
00:03:43
Speaker
And then as you start to run more and more campaigns and pay more and more attention to it, you see, okay, there's so much happening here.
00:03:54
Speaker
after that person submits their email, as they use and engage with the product. So many teams that influence that behavior outside of paid.
00:04:05
Speaker
Was that like a natural kind of evolution for you to start paying more attention to the product side things? Yes, I would say it was natural. And also as I was but learning more about the discipline and what are the different levers you can pull and thinking about it holistically rather than being really focused on this like top of funnel metrics such as capital acquisition costs, payback period.
00:04:33
Speaker
What is else out there? like What are the other metrics ah we can influence and what is important for the business? So once I started and gaining this more holistic view, was like, you onboarding is super important, like activation rates, things like that. Like they influence LTV yeah much more than probably, you know, at tweaking the top of the funnel or like different creative message.
00:05:03
Speaker
I'm not discounting the importance of like top of funnel and acquisition. like i still think it's super important, but like you have to ah just think about the whole funnel.
Bridging Marketing and Product Teams
00:05:15
Speaker
And that's kind of how I'm thinking about the drought and thinking about it holistically. and Back then, i was I started talking to product teams and folks from, thinking back from then, data science when and they were building some like LTV models and I started getting interested in that.
00:05:35
Speaker
And this is, again, like how I gained this more holistic view in terms of the journey of a user. Do you think it was ultimately it like like a metric that kind of made you realize that?
00:05:52
Speaker
And the question behind the question is, yeah know i wonder if more entry level or even senior marketers can become more of a generalist by focusing on ah specific metric like ROI and moving away from this very like CAC oriented acquisition mindset.
00:06:13
Speaker
but So maybe to go back a little bit to your previous question and previous point of like you see the impact in acquisition and that's what drives me.
00:06:24
Speaker
Like I really love seeing the impact almost immediately from the campaigns and launchings and the creative tests and all of that. But then again, like once I start thinking more about the business as a whole and like what's important, like revenue is important in the end of the day is your mostly post product market set.
00:06:45
Speaker
Right. And like what are the inputs on the revenue? What are some of the input metrics? And this is where, you know, you again start thinking about like Yes, there is cap, there is all those leading indicators, but like it's revenue and ROI is the ultimate metric. Like what are some other levers you can pull and what are some other metrics that actually matter and move the needle outside of acquisition metrics? So probably answer your question, it's a yes. Like you have to think about ROI.
00:07:26
Speaker
on a business level or a company level and start putting it all together and really understanding how the business works. I think it's really easy to get caught up with like your day to day, like optimization type of work and being focused only like return on ad spend, that payback period and kind of missing out on this broader picture.
00:07:50
Speaker
But if you want to it'll grow and develop in this discipline. Like you have to understand how the business works, how it makes money, like what are the different levers you can pull there.
00:08:03
Speaker
You have the kind of interesting experience of sitting on both teams and working on both teams and maybe even beyond paid and growth product, life cycle, et cetera.
00:08:19
Speaker
I totally agree that having this kind of holistic perspective makes you a better whatever your job function is. do you think that it is more of a pronounced problem in the paid marketing function, in the product function, in the lifecycle function?
00:08:36
Speaker
Like where are folks more siloed? Where are folks able to be more of a generalist? Or is it just kind of everybody? I think it can happen to everybody. But from what I've seen, it's less so common for product folks because like a good product manager and they're they've probably heard this they're like ceo of their feature or like whatever product they're working on so they have to understand that that they're ultimately
00:09:06
Speaker
Their success is measured by the success of the product and the revenue. But then folks in marketing and growth-like marketing, especially you're like if you're focused on one channel or one tactic and you go really deep into it, you can definitely be siloed.
00:09:25
Speaker
And this also brings me to this topic of marketing versus product and where that where is this line that divides it and how do you bridge the gap between product and marketing?
00:09:40
Speaker
And I think that a lot of organizations, big and small, have this challenge of yeah marketing living in a silo of products, not knowing what marketing is working on, but like how they communicate a specific specific feature.
00:09:59
Speaker
And i think this is super important to close this gap, be as close as possible. I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all approach. or like you know The ideal team set, it's very individual for each organization. But if you're within the team, you have to be thinking or about... like If you're on the marketing team, you have to be thinking about...
00:10:23
Speaker
What's the product doing? How do I learn more about it? How do I communicate what my team is doing to the product? How do I learn from the product team? like they do They're probably doing a lot of user research. How do I take this insight and apply them to maybe my creative strategy on the user acquisition side, or maybe some of my messaging on the website? Things like that are just so crucial for being successful and operating a you know as a team as a whole and not being silent as you said.
Challenges of Cross-Functional Collaboration
00:10:54
Speaker
I think a ah good actionable tip for for anybody, whether they're on the product or marketing side, is to audit yourself and think in a given week, the decisions that I'm making, the tasks that I'm doing, what are the inputs that go behind that task? So when if I'm a channel manager and I am responsible for creating paid creative,
00:11:19
Speaker
What are the inputs that go into that creative? Is it the recent performance on Google? Or am I getting insight from product that informs the creative? Am I using competitor research?
00:11:31
Speaker
Am I using different data points from from the product team? And maybe similarly on the on the product team, when I'm making this a decision about a feature to add, am I only looking at product research, what's happening in the funnel?
00:11:45
Speaker
Am I also taking inputs from response rates on different messaging ads and and things like that? So for the synergy to happen, you're right. It's probably different in each organization. But if you're sitting within an organization, you can practice some self-awareness and say, am I using kind of a diversified set of inputs to make these decisions on a day-to-day basis?
00:12:09
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And i think from both sides, people will welcome these suggestions. Like I think the product manager would love some insights from your creative tests and seeing like what resonates and what doesn't. And then if you have this relationship with the product manager of the product team as a whole, it can also inform your product chat ah your creative tasks and go beyond just you know testing different hooks, but maybe testing just like completely different value propositions, or maybe there is like this specific audience
00:12:48
Speaker
that the product team is thinking about and they're not, they they still like not correct the use case or the product market fit for this specific use case. And you can go and think together, how can you test that from top of funnel and then feed those learnings back.
Sharing Insights for Synergistic Growth
00:13:07
Speaker
Sure. I've seen that it can be challenging to do certain cross-functional work. you know Just to simply state that these different functions are in silos and we have to fix them is a little bit lazy.
00:13:22
Speaker
And I've also seen where trying to force collaboration between teams where there's not like an aligned business case usually fails.
00:13:34
Speaker
And I'm thinking about examples like Well, the lifecycle and paid marketing team don't really talk a lot. So like we should have a meeting and talk more. And then you realize, hey, the way you're evaluating things are completely different. Your messaging is completely different. and We're showing you things that you don't care about.
00:13:50
Speaker
So maybe there is some trial and error there.
00:13:55
Speaker
but Sure. And I've also seen this between paid team or like gross marketing team and a brand marketing team or like a social team, depending on how it's structured and same thing.
00:14:10
Speaker
your creative testing on the user acquisition side, they can potentially inform some of the social strategy and the content that's put out on social channels or some the brand communications and vice versa.
00:14:25
Speaker
But like there is a difference in terms of how these teams view. those things and like what which metrics are important to them and just like frankly the mindset can be different so i think you need to come into it first of all with like being open to different perspectives and you know in as we as you mentioned previously like you can be really focused on like this one metric and this is what's important for you and like your this is the most important thing but i think when you come and collaborate with those teams you have to be kind of more open-minded and accepting that like their world is very different from your world
00:15:13
Speaker
And the second thing is, like same as with product, you have to give value. So think it's great that you should come in with a PM or someone one on the social team, on the brand team, and you say like, hey these are some learnings and i think these learnings might be useful for you and like no pressure if they're not like here is what works for us in the past month here is you know like the copy and the hooks that whatever like messaging that works the formatting that work these are the audiences that converted the best like you just
00:15:54
Speaker
kind of can give it to them and then let them decide whether it's uh helpful and useful for them or not and this is how you start kind of this relationship and as you said like not putting time on the calendar with a topic of brand and marketing like sharing equal like collaborating like whatever it is i'm a proponent of like giving value first and then seeing how it goes from there For sure.
00:16:24
Speaker
Yeah. and And I mean that that sharing can have a ah compounding effect over time where you see that teams are starting to just act more synergistically, being aware of what the other teams are working on taking that into account, taking that into consideration.
00:16:46
Speaker
and I think it's it's a really good kind of tip for for junior marketers. I mean, I manage a team of of kind of more junior folks or more even more senior leaders that you can come up with a experiment. You can come up with a a report, a visual, an insight, et cetera.
00:17:07
Speaker
And that data, that value is leveraged by the amount of people that can act on it. And so when you're getting an interesting insight on a piece of ad creative, it's only it's so valuable if you share it with your paid marketing team. It's more valuable if you share it with paid and lifecycle. It's more valuable if you share it with a company.
Developing a Holistic Experimentation Strategy
00:17:31
Speaker
And so thinking about like insights and learnings as this thing that has leverage, I think is a nice framing for it. Yeah. And I will say that when you're thinking about like what to share, i don't think it's best to share just metrics. And, you know, here is the top performing creative in terms of spend or in terms of CTR, in terms CPA, whatever metric there is.
00:18:02
Speaker
It's the most valuable bill is like the why behind it. Like why is this on the top performer? Like watts what is the thing that worked? Like how does it compare against the others? Not in terms of metric, but more in terms of like in this hook, we started with the problem versus, you know, highlighting our user and laying our user persona, whatever it is.
00:18:29
Speaker
And we found out that this actually resonates more. Just like, speaking the natural language and don't assume they know like all your metrics that are important for paid user acquisition.
00:18:43
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. And i think like even even that as an exercise is a valuable exercise for somebody to think about and helps them to extrapolate their value across functions because you could see a piece of creative. And if you said, ok tell me,
00:19:03
Speaker
Tell the paid team why this is interesting. You have to think about a way to message it to the paid team. But if you have to think to yourself, tell me how this is valuable for the lifecycle team, well, then you have to put yourself in the lifecycle team's shoes, which gets you thinking in that different way.
00:19:18
Speaker
I want to talk about experimentation for a little bit because it's something that we're all doing. And you know what i'm what I'm curious to get your feedback on as someone sits on the paid and the the product side is how you think about kind of like an overarching experiment ah growth experimentation strategy where it's okay to have silos where it's not.
00:19:44
Speaker
And the quite the reason that I ask is that, you know, at my company, I see that we have kind of paid budget experiments that we run. We have creative experiments that we run.
00:19:55
Speaker
The Lifecycle team has email and kind of audience is experience experiments they run. The product team has a whole bunch of things that sometimes have nothing to do with messaging and are more technical that they run.
00:20:09
Speaker
And that stuff can become quite siloed, but it also kind of relates to this conversation we're having around like what is valuable for everyone. And I wonder like at your current role at Hover in the past, how you've thought about kind of experimentation strategy more holistically across these different functions.
Communicating Experiment Results
00:20:30
Speaker
Yeah, it's a big topic. i i unless I haven't seen an experimentation program that would work across all the functions that you mentioned in like in one place.
00:20:44
Speaker
So it will probably be siloed unless you have maybe at your early stage, a very tight team that just runs experiments across the full funnel, which I've also seen before.
00:21:00
Speaker
But if you're large organization, you know, like probably 1,500 plus people, you will have those functions owning their own experimentation roadmap and prioritizing their experiments based on their own KRs, metrics that they want to move.
00:21:19
Speaker
And I think that, frankly, I think that's okay. But I will say that sharing the learnings from this experiment, this is what's super important. So once you... And let's let's talk about acquisition as one of the examples. And we'll use a simple example, like launching a new channel test.
00:21:40
Speaker
Like you want to test Reddit, right? And you're you're doing it, ah you're mainly allocating whatever, like 5%, maybe even 10% in this given month.
00:21:51
Speaker
And you have like all your metrics or experiment plan, budget, et cetera, et cetera. In this case, you want to communicate what you're doing even before you launch that.
00:22:02
Speaker
to the product team and the lifecycle team because it's going to change the mix of the users and it can potentially impact down the final metrics and it can potentially impact activation rates and like email open rates and all all of that.
00:22:19
Speaker
And there's been like many times when someone from product pings me and say, hey, we noticed this drop in our onboarding conversion rate.
00:22:31
Speaker
Have you made any changes to your channel mix? Have you lodged any experiments? And then there's been times when they you know they might have assumed that or they might not even ask and this kind of got lost in translation. So you want to be proactive with this these type of things.
00:22:48
Speaker
And then on the other hand, if there is an experiment in and on the lifecycle side with some email flows, notifications, whatever it is,
00:23:00
Speaker
this can also impact your return of ads. And it might be hard to kind of pinpoint, especially if you're running many experiments simultaneously.
00:23:13
Speaker
But what I'm leaning to is, is but again, like look at this holistically. And if your experiment is big enough that it can either impact down funnel performance or know after final performance in this case but communicate what you're trying to do beforehand and give heads up to the other team so then already kind of know it and keep in mind and then once the experiment is finished you want to share out learnings.
00:23:45
Speaker
I think that's that should be the default. we like Sharing learnings is so important because you cannot even know in some cases that like your experiment results might spark some other idea or impact the lifecycle team is thinking about this sequence, this workflow.
00:24:06
Speaker
So I don't know if it's like a good enough answer. Again, i haven't seen like a holistic experiment program run across all the functions, but the sharing piece is just crucial as I see it.
Aligning Metrics Across Teams
00:24:22
Speaker
Yeah, I think that that that sharing piece is where there needs to be some sort of, you know, there there's that usually happens at the executive level.
00:24:33
Speaker
And then i think that executives also have a responsibility to distribute down that knowledge accordingly. And that also becomes a challenge where the paid team, for example, runs an experiment and then shares it with the VP of growth marketing.
00:24:53
Speaker
And then the VP of growth marketing brings that into the weekly exec meeting and the VP of lifecycle marketing hears about it. but then the junior lifecycle marketer doesn't hear about it. So there is sometimes that kind of challenge too, where I think like execs a lot of times get access to a lot of information that maybe they don't always share out ah as effectively to their teams.
00:25:21
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's true. And, you know, they typically have a lot on their plate.
00:25:29
Speaker
Sure. Yeah, it's it's it's an unfortunate thing. And I think, you know, we're talking a lot about cross-functional dynamics. It's just the the reality of the the world sometimes is that you're working on a million different things you don't remember to share. Or if you are ah more kind of junior person, you don't know what impacts your world just yet.
00:25:52
Speaker
And I think that also comes back to the focus on that that all teams should be oriented around similar metrics when possible, like revenue, like ROI, and be able to reverse engineer their metrics and their KPIs to that. like I think that it's okay for the lifecycle team to be focused on open rate. It's okay for the social and team to be focused on engagement and organic impression volume.
00:26:23
Speaker
But being able to translate that into ROI is super helpful so that they understand, hey, like my impressions are going to get a better ROI on the social side if there's a better onboarding funnel.
00:26:36
Speaker
Like my life cycle emails are going to get a better open rate and that will translate to ROI down the road if there's better paid ad creative. So yeah, maybe like KPI alignment is where some of these issues get fixed.
00:26:51
Speaker
Yeah, but I agree, but I will say that like yeah, revenue is the ultimate matter. And then each team probably have their inputs that they're trying to move and that ladder up to revenue.
00:27:06
Speaker
But then one's team's input can also input the other team's input in a negative way. But like net net, it will be positive.
00:27:17
Speaker
And again, maybe giving it and like an extreme example with user acquisition, you can launch a channel which drives super cheap signups and yeah, their conversion rates suck. But at the end of the day, it's ROAS positive and it's ROAS like 2x higher than other channel.
00:27:38
Speaker
It hurts and impacts all the life cycle metrics because they don't open be email so they even the emails emails bounce and all of that.
00:27:49
Speaker
But at the end of the day, with this volume, you're able to drive more revenue. And depending on if you're focused on your revenue growth or profitability, this might make sense.
00:28:02
Speaker
yeah Yeah. So there is always this like dynamic and kind of trade-offs it's, I think it's a little bit more nuanced and not like always as perfect as we think it is.
00:28:15
Speaker
And you have just to, you have to just accept this reality and like try to do your best to navigate it.
Strategies for Scaling YouTube Influencer Programs
00:28:23
Speaker
Sure. Switching gears, I know we wanted to talk about scaling an influencer program and specifically scaling a YouTube influencer program.
00:28:33
Speaker
There are a lot of folks listening to this that will want to scale ah YouTube influencer program. So can you tell me a little bit about how you've done that in the past and you know how that might be valuable for for folks listening?
00:28:46
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So when speaking of influencers, I'm personally a big fan of YouTube for a few reasons. One, it helps build your long tail and organic traffic content on YouTube videos. And YouTube, they live on YouTube forever, as you know, as opposed to Instagram and TikTok.
00:29:06
Speaker
They're searchable. YouTube does search engine number two in terms of volume. after Google. So you will have this long tail effect if you post on YouTube and if you collaborate with a YouTube influencer that eventually will improve your organic traffic.
00:29:26
Speaker
It's kind of your pay once but you have this long tailed check. And this is one of the biggest reasons why I personally like it. And then there are a few more. It's like, typically if you work with a creator, they're like very engaged, they have more loyal audience.
00:29:44
Speaker
I would have just, you know, scrolling through reels on Instagram where like you don't even know who this creator is. Like typically on YouTube, they have more engagement because they have more low-term viewers, like people follow their specific creators, they wait for their videos, things like that.
00:30:03
Speaker
I also think it's easier to measure sure because you have like more real estate, you can put links into descriptions, and you can leave them there, you have comments, you have like other ways to engage the audience.
00:30:19
Speaker
And I think like, frankly, just more trustworthy as a channel. So these are just like some of the reasons why I personally love YouTube. Not saying that you should not do Instagram and TikTok other channels, but I've seen success with YouTube for these specific reasons.
00:30:38
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I have tried to keep it relatively high level, but I'll go over some important, maybe misconceptions and some important things that you should pay attention to, starting with, like, is this even the right channel for you?
00:30:57
Speaker
Like, how do you evaluate that? And yeah the the the first step would be to research like whether your audience spends time on YouTube. And I'm pretty sure, unless it's like a very specific audience segment, the answer is yes.
00:31:14
Speaker
The next step is like, there are enough creators or channels that are within your op-end or segment. And here you can, you know, if you're now like selling houseplants, just as a random example, there are like quite a few channels that talk about houseplants.
00:31:37
Speaker
right and no shortage of that but if you're like into some very specific qwerty whatever topic maybe there's just not enough channels there and it doesn't make sense for you because if you won't be able to scale and if you work and maybe there are like two or three channels it's probably not worth it to be honest they probably don't have a lot of views So it's already this.
00:32:02
Speaker
And then you would you will you can say like, hey, but then there are like all these lifestyle channels and video or v blogs and whatever it is that kind of tailor to a very broad audience.
00:32:15
Speaker
Like, yes, you can do this, but... I'm personally more fan of like going more specialized and maybe you're you're sacrificing the views, but you're getting attention of the audience that actually matters to you.
00:32:32
Speaker
And I think this is a good bridge to like, what are the metrics that are important when evaluating channels? And I've seen that in a lot of times people look at the number of followers.
00:32:44
Speaker
um But this is actually not important because you're not paying for followers. You're paying for views. You're paying for impressions. So you want to look at how many views on average the channel gets and what can you kind of, what can you expect there?
00:33:00
Speaker
And you also want to look at consistency because maybe some video, maybe a creator had like one or two viral videos and then all the other videos are like thousand views or even less than that.
00:33:13
Speaker
risks that, you know? So you want to look at views, you want to look at engagement, like likes and comments, you want to look at how frequently in this creative post.
00:33:25
Speaker
um But my point is like, followers doesn't really matter. Let's just get a take a very specific example, right? Let's just say i created this like digital nomad keyboard. That's the lightest keyboard the world that can fit in your backpack that you don't have to to think about.
00:33:45
Speaker
but My target audience is, you know, 25 to 40 is single or in a relationship, not married. and I find a list of digital nomad influencers on YouTube to go after. and I see, okay, these guys have ah a good consistent content that they're putting out, a good number views, et cetera.
00:34:05
Speaker
I have a list and I'm ready to reach out to them, but I'm like, shit, how do I know that this is going to be profitable? How do i reach out? How do I do that? I go from there. Before you reach out, and I'll talk about reaching out in a sec, but before you reach out, like you need to model this all out.
00:34:21
Speaker
And as you said, like, how do you, how do you know how, how much to pay for that? So you, you might want to go backwards from your but customer acquisition costs and what makes sense for you. And if the keyboard costs like whatever, $100 and you're making, what's like, what what is your profit margin on that?
00:34:44
Speaker
You want to go backwards from it and then build some assumptions. So let's say you want to work with an influencer who gets 20,000 views on a video.
00:34:57
Speaker
You assume one, maybe like 2% conversion rate from 20,000 views. So you would have like 400 clicks on or 400 visits on your website. And then on a net 400, maybe you like 200.
00:35:14
Speaker
5% would convert into buying. That's and you would have 20 conversions, like 20 people will purchase. This is all kind made up, but I think it's in the ballpark.
00:35:26
Speaker
And this goes back to, okay, like 20 purchases, $100, you know, two k how much what is my traffic margin here and then like this is how much you can afford to pay that influencer based on it and you come up with uh essentially a cpm and you can apply this cpm to to this influencer now when you're reaching out like i'm not a fan of just giving a price right away i'm more towards like
00:35:57
Speaker
this is the product like keep it short like this is the product that we're a big fan of your channel of your content i think it's a great fit for your audience would you be interested in collaborating and like how much do you charge for it like to let them give you a number first and then you look at this number and you see like does it make sense for you based on these calculations that i just walked you through And I think there is like, there's definitely room like in going over and going under.
00:36:29
Speaker
Maybe it's like a really great fit and you're assuming a high conversion rate so you can afford a higher CPL. Or maybe it's more of a like a lifestyle channel and you're assuming a low conversion rate so your CPL will be lower.
00:36:44
Speaker
and you're applying these like average years for video, and you're figuring out your CPM based on the quote the influencer gave you, and you're just looking at the math and seeing if it financially makes sense for you. but One of the challenges with this now is the supply and demand market of influencers is different for a given industry.
00:37:06
Speaker
And so there are scenarios in which, for example, in the finance industry, they are just going to have really, really high CPMs. And so if you want to work with influencers, you sometimes need to be a little bit creative and think about,
00:37:24
Speaker
Where is, who is my target audience? And if I am, you know, marketing a ah keyboard, for example, and like maybe digital nomads are too expensive. So maybe I look to the tech reviewer pool, or maybe I look in another kind of category to figure out something that makes sense for my unit economics.
00:37:46
Speaker
Yeah, and I think there are a few um factors that go into it and a few levers, if you will. You can work with two large influencers or 20 small ones.
00:38:00
Speaker
And I'm a proponent of working with smaller influencers because you're kind of diversifying your risk. And typically what I've seen is out of 20 influencers, you would have like an 80-20 rule apply and like 80% of your conversions would be driven by like one or two influencers.
00:38:19
Speaker
And then all the rest would be kind of a long tail. So you're diversifying your risk where to which these smaller micro influencers, if you will. you can also You can also think about different formats. It can be kind of an...
00:38:34
Speaker
And a full integration at the beginning of the video can be an integration in the middle of the video, the end of the video and price is different based on it. You can also maybe think of it like what I laid out in this calculation. This is like a very performance driven approach, right?
00:38:53
Speaker
But you're also getting some brand awareness and brand value and you want to think of like, what is kind of the dollar amount that you can apply to it from that perspective?
00:39:05
Speaker
You can also think of, oh, maybe they can give me licensing rights to use at these assets, this video for some of my ads.
00:39:16
Speaker
And this is this is like a big factor. You're immediately saving on some of the UGC content that you'll be producing otherwise, and you're gaining more credibility in your ads ah when people see this influencer in your ads.
00:39:31
Speaker
So that's another type. So I think there are like... different ways of, yes, like it's expensive, but you can you can say think about it and you can kind of mitigate this risk of being super expensive for these strategies.
Misconceptions Between Marketing and Product Roles
00:39:47
Speaker
I love it. And I think ah like, you know, if if you're a marketer that's listening to this and you're making that trade off between a lot of times it's going to be like a more upper funnel awareness based channel and you want to allocate some more budget to influencers. Well, now you kind of have an approach where you are starting with your ultimate KPI and then you are reverse engineering all the other metrics to work your way back from there.
00:40:16
Speaker
Yeah, and i really I really like that. That's super valuable. I know we have a little bit of time left. I want to kind of finish up with some rapid fire, if you wouldn't mind. All right, let's do it. Sweet. All right, first question. Favorite book all marketers should read?
00:40:33
Speaker
Contagious by and John L. Beggar. Yeah. Yeah. I really love that book. I think it's very like I, i in general, I think that human psychology or and human behavior is so important to work with you as marketers.
00:40:51
Speaker
And it lays out in simple terms of like, what is, what is like, why do some products go viral? and like but it was it what is it driven by and this is more like psychology level. So it helps you just understand it and put yourself in the shoes of customers actually.
00:41:13
Speaker
Cool. What do marketers get wrong about product and what do product folks get wrong about marketing? Marketers get wrong about product is I think marketers in many cases think that when a new product is built or like a new feature in the product is built it's like a well-defined thing where like we gotta build exactly this thing and it's gonna work because we did because the product team did all the research and all the coping and all of that and we're putting so much time into building this feature
00:41:58
Speaker
But in reality, it's kind of like each feature can be kind of like free product market for a startup. It cannot be a set. And maybe they're not using the right messaging to describe it.
00:42:10
Speaker
Maybe it's not the right to tune the ICP and the value. and they're also figuring it out in some cases as they go so i would say like marketers should not treat the work of product as like a very straightforward thing like they they absolutely are absolutely confident that this is gonna work and kind of give give them some flack on that
00:42:41
Speaker
And product, I would say typically they underestimate the value of marketing. And I'm not saying that because I'm more on the marketing side of things, but it's not like, you know, build this thing and they will come, ah which is, you know, you see it.
00:42:58
Speaker
and But you also see that like this is not true. And i think they underestimate the value of the brand marketing work and the wireless work and like all those little things that shape up marketing as a function just beyond growth, right? Like they all contribute to the success of the product.
00:43:22
Speaker
Sure. I love that. This might be like completely random, but it kind of reminds me of like, if you, if you are, you know, you live with a significant other, like you're like living at home, like, like my dad.
Overhyped Growth Trends and AI in Video Production
00:43:37
Speaker
would you know mow the lawn or like clean something in the house that was dirty and he comes over and he's like like look at look how nice it is and it's just like i'm like oh cool like the lawns mowed great but he puts so much effort into cleaning that thing and it just looks normal to me but he's like oh i'm so proud of it and maybe it's like the pro the product team engineers they put so much effort into this thing um but then they they don't maybe like understand that
00:44:04
Speaker
that value still needs to be communicated and described and and people are not they don't have the same investment in that thing that the product marketer or product team actually has.
00:44:16
Speaker
Yeah, I'll say one one last quick thing is I think a lot of people think that they are marketers and they have like a lot of opinions on that, which I think is fine. And, you know, you see a billboard on on the road and and like you have an opinion about it. Is it good? Is it bad?
00:44:36
Speaker
And it I think it's much harder to have an opinion about like a specific product decision. So, and this is where also like a little bit of misconceptions and maybe even tension comes from. Okay.
00:44:52
Speaker
Last question in July of 2025 today. What do you think iss the most overhyped growth trend? Probably controversial, but using AI for video creative production, especially for like UEC style type of videos, you can still obviously tell it it's like not a real human.
00:45:16
Speaker
Even like, i think there is this... kind of uncanny valley thing like it looks very real but there is still like something that kind of itches you and you're not believing it's real and i think we're still not there yet and i don't know when we will be in terms of like video production i think for statics it's amazing but for a video there is like linkedin's are very over indexing on that right now but there is still value in just just pure ugc content that you would get from your creators
00:45:54
Speaker
A hundred percent. And I think, I mean, one of the like things that to me is overhyped is that you need to be testing thousands of different variations of creative. I think that's absolutely bullshit. like I think that you just need to create, you need to know what but what your value prop is and you have to have a certain amount of diversification, but you don't need thousands of ads. And the whole like AI helps you create thousands of variations. i don't think that you need that.
00:46:20
Speaker
Now, it's it's definitely industry dependent. Like maybe e-com, you have a bunch of SKUs. Like it's it's a little bit different and things like that. But for the most part, yeah, that's my strong opinion.
00:46:31
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Thank you. We're wrapped. Cool. Andre, thank you so much for joining the show today. Thanks for having me, Paul. It's a pleasure.