Episode 34: David Fallarme-The New Age Markete
About David Fallarme:
My next guest on The One Percent Project is David Fallarme. Before joining On Deck as their Marketing Director, David was the head of marketing for Hubspot Asia. He has led the product and content marketing initiatives for Electronic Arts, App Annie and ReferralCandy. He also runs the APAC Marketers Roundtable, one of the most active communities of marketers in APAC.
Listen on:
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In this conversation he talks about:
What is marketing and the types of marketers?
His content creation framework
Why should marketers focus on who should be buying vs who is already buying?
How should early-stage founders think about marketing and marketers?
How is marketing different in 2021 Vs a decade ago?
How Hubspot's strategy may seem weird but it works?
Zoom's and Afterpay's product-led growth through the pandemic.
Why he joined On Deck, and how will it add value in Asia?
Key Take-Aways:
There are three types of marketers:
Artist: Marketing = winning hearts and minds.
Soldier: Marketing = achieving objectives by working through the system and operational excellence.
Gambler: Marketing = finding opportunities with an asymmetric upside.
Marketers are multipliers. So if you're a pre-seed or a seed-stage start-up and don’t see a predictable level of traction and don't exactly know who your customer is, you are not ready for a marketer.
In future, your social media audience size will be more important than your resume because your followership is an indicator of your influence.
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Transcript:
*The transcripts are not 100% accurate.
Pritish: What is marketing?
David: Marketing, I think is just the act of there's a product that exists. And you want to show that product to people who will benefit from it. And so there's an end state of people using and enjoying the product.
And there's the starting state of people don't know about the product. Don't know how it benefits them. And marketing?
is the act of bridging those two states together. So. That really depends the next level down on the industry and all that kind of stuff. But at a high level, you are a function of the business that makes sure that whatever is being produced, actually lands in the hands or minds or computers, the people who could actually benefit from them.
And so that, it's a, it's a function that allows you to do that successfully over time.
Pritish: You've written about the types of marketers, three types of marketers. So, can you double click on that?
David: Yes, why did I write that post? It's a reflection on my own career, and the things that I've seen, and maybe if you're a founder listening to this, or if you're early to mid-career, and you have something to do with marketing, you might be able to relate to what I'm about to say, which is you run into a problem in your company and one of the first things people do is, oh, man, I'm running into this problem. Let me just ask on social media, how people solve this, or let me Google something. Let me look into these newsletters and find a bunch of podcasts that try to address this problem that I'm facing. One of the things you find while you're doing that, is there are tons of different answers and tones of different best practices.
A lot of smart people will tell you a lot of different things, and you actually don't know who to listen to because it all sounds good. It all sounds perfect. So, I think the way to navigate this is to realize that there are three types of marketers, not one is better than the others, not one is smarter or dumber than the other. I think they all have good intentions. But everybody has different DNA and different experiences that shape how they think and it results in these three different kinds of marketers, and it's from this lens, and from their own experiences that they now give their advice. So, the three types of marketers are, first of all, there's the artist. For those of you who might know, he's this person who has always given really thoughtful, big picture views and how marketing is supposed to work and the way he does this is, he inspires you to think about the art of marketing.
Marketing is that you have to create a Purple Cow, it's not pricing, and you have to make something unique, something that outlives you that is going to be part of your legacy. That's almost how he thinks about it to inspire people. So, whenever you read a book, or a blog post, or listen to a podcast, it's always this angle of inspiring people, instill emotion, you have to put them in their tribe and it's correct, it's absolutely correct if you view it from the artist lens. However, there are also marketers who are just as successful, and I would call them the soldier type, which is, whenever you hear advice, its, oh, marketing is not rocket science; it's just a bunch of numbers. If you're going to do a bunch of SEO, then it's about keyword research.
It's about quantifying the impact in spreadsheets and Google Analytics. So, it's very methodical, and it's like a process driven, do this, then that just like a soldier would in the military, it's very processed, you can rise through the ranks this way. Again, there are a lot of blog posts and marketing posts about best practices, but you just have to know you're listening to somebody who subscribes to this worldview. Then lastly, I would say there's something called the gambler, which is somebody who doesn't think at all like an artist, and doesn't think at all, like a soldier. They would never say, oh, this is stupid, you should not think about art, or you should not think about the process. Marketing is really just like a VC game, it's like a power law, it's an exponential model, where you just need one win, and you erase nine bad tries, nine bad bets are erased by one win.
So, you should just try a bunch of stuff. So, this person is going to say, hey, you should be growth hacking, you should be doing a lot of experiments, you should be doing all sorts of things that allow you to get referral programmes and all that kind of stuff. Not wrong based on the artist or the soldier, just a different way of thinking. So as a marketer, you can use this framework to prevent yourself from getting too confused about all the best practices, and all the advice out there. Are you listening to somebody as an artist because you can predictably expect them to talk about things in a certain way! Is it a soldier, who's somebody who's going to say, you should be methodical? Or are you listening to somebody who's a gambler, and if you look at their background, you can tell what kind of projects they've done and they're going to be advocating for things that are maybe a bit of grey hat, maybe some black hat, and things at scale, where you can run a lot of experiments. So, you just have to know which one is most appropriate for your situation. Take a best guess around which one is going to be most relevant to the problems that you're facing and then that allows you to bucket which advice to listen to and at what time
Pritish: Would you say growth people are marketers?
David: Growth people are marketers! Well, it depends on if you agree with my definition, that marketing is really closing those two end states, it's a function in the business, the closest to end states, there's a product that exists, nobody knows about it, or we don't know who we should have been sell this to. The end state is, we have a lot of people, we know exactly who we're selling to and we have a way to get it to those people such that they can get value. If you take that definition of marketing, and I know it's very broad. But yeah, growth totally falls into the marketing sphere. If we're talking about, where does it belong in the org chart, then some people will have different disagreements, but at its heart, I think marketing certainly encompasses a lot of what you would think of as a growth function. Let me put it this way. You can't do growth without knowing marketing principles.
Pritish: Yeah, that's the most apt way to put it. So, what kind of marketer is Andrew Chen a16z?
David: Yeah, what kind of marketer is Andrew Chen! He probably falls into the gambler bucket, especially at his time at Uber, and I was a VC. So, his mind thinks in terms of, I only need one win in order to justify these nine losses. A lot of the stuff that he writes about is within the context of the VC funded b2c model of Silicon Valley. A lot of those things are, let's do some hyper aggressive tests, we have a tonne of money. So, let's just run a lot of experiments through AB tests. Let's test all these different channels, let's hire engineers to run these growth hacks. So, that's how I would characterize him. I'm not saying that he can't do the other ways, but just from what I've learned, the things that he advocates, it's probably leaning towards the gambler model, where you're doing things at scale, you're writing a lot of experiments, and you're doubling down on the ones that show some traction.
Pritish: You're a prolific writer. You have your blog, marketing blogs, which you started in 2009. You have a thriving APEC market community; you also do long-form content on LinkedIn. So, what is your content framework?
David: I can answer your question is more like why do I produce so much content? What is it for? What is the benefit of doing all this stuff? The short answer is I just do it. I think it's something that I would do, even if nobody was reading my stuff, even if I was the only one reading it. Oddly enough, I think that's the reason why I'm able to produce so much content. It's because I don't have this curse of perfectionism, where all I'm doing is articulating thoughts I have in my head. I get satisfaction from just putting those out into the world, because it allows me to reflect on my learning.
It allows me to internalize anything new that I've learned, and at the same time, it benefits other people. So, from that lens, it's almost like a no brainer to produce so much content, where if I learn something new at work, or I'm reading something or I attend to meet up, it's a natural outcome of me doing those things that I've learned something. So, all I'm doing is writing down what I've learned. Now, all the other stuff like the community, I think those are nice, natural knock-on consequences, there's a positive way to say they were consequences because I'm producing so much work and content, and just being so publicly visible as a result of those things, it’s like people naturally coalesce around those ideas or there are people who also want to discuss those things. I've noticed that in the APEC region, a lot of the people at least that are in my circles, we look to Silicon Valley, or Western countries for a lot of marketing knowledge.
But increasingly more and more, there are a lot of smart people here in Asia, in India. In this time zone space, I feel like my part of my job is just to make sure to collect all those people, share knowledge between each other, and nudge the APEC ecosystem in a small way however I can.
Pritish: A lot of beginners who think of writing content or doing podcasts, they feel an insecurity for a better word of who's going to read my content, or who is going to listen to this. But if you are somebody who thinks of actually writing it, irrespective of who's going to read and you like writing that, those individuals are able to actually cross the chasm if I may, and start writing and over a period of time, they are able to actually bring the community and a sticky readership or listenership.
David: Yeah, yeah, 100%, I think that's one of the things that people get caught up at instead of thinking of it as anything that I publish online will now live forever and my name will be on it, that's the wrong way to think about it. There are two frameworks that I like. About that, one is working with the garage door open. So, just think about doing a bunch of things and just letting people participate in your own learning process. Then the other is, if I guess, if you don't have garage, think of it as learning out loud. So, everything that happens to you that you want to keep in your mind for a future situation where you might apply that learning again or just something where you were emotionally struck by something that you saw on YouTube that changed the way you work. You're learning out loud, so, all you're doing is, hey, and what did I learn today? I'm just going to document that and share it with the world. If people get value, that's fine, that's a bonus.
But I've already gotten value by just practicing that muscle. I had a really interesting learning or lesson I want to keep. I'm now getting to retain that knowledge more, because I'm going through the act of writing it in my own words, so, that's already a win. And then when you hit publish, now you're learning out loud, other people can benefit or resonate with the things that you've learned as well. There's also a nice, additional benefit to that which is sometimes what you learnt is actually incorrect, or it's not a perfect, capturing of what you actually learnt. Some people will correct you, and then help you make your mental model stronger.
Pritish: You're doing a post on how marketers should be looking for consumers who can buy rather than doubling down on consumers you're already buying. So, how would you try and figure out? What would be your framework in figuring out who should be buying?
David: Yeah, if you're having a problem with marketing, again, closing those two end states that I talked about; it's usually because you haven't married the concept of what you're doing in marketing to the business model. So, once those two things are aligned, a lot of problems reveal themselves, a lot of solutions present themselves. So, the post I was talking about, just for context, is based on my experience at HubSpot, where HubSpot gets a tonne of inbound demand, and we have tones of leads, we never really have a problem with people finding out about HubSpot, signing up for a free CRM, or eBooks and because we have this crazy inbound lead machine, our sales reps spend a lot of time fielding requests for more pricing information.
But sometimes these requests are from people who are not necessarily a great fit for HubSpot, but there are just so many of them that you can't help but react to this demand. What I'm saying is that in a huge learning that we found within HubSpot, take a step back from what is coming in and think about what would make your company grow faster if it was aligned with your own business model. So, what we found is the people who were giving us a lot of demand and asking for a lot of pricing information and signing up, they were on the lower end of average revenue per user, whereas to make our business more successful in Asia, we really need to be focusing more on the higher ARPU customers. But we just could not address this segment because we were flooded with inbound demand. So, once we took a step back and said, what is it going to take to make sure that our business in Asia can be even healthier, can grow even faster, it's like we need to be focusing on the higher revenue segment.
So, we need to find ways to reprioritize how much attention the lower ARPU customers get. So, once we figured out that our go to market needed to align with our growth targets, a lot of things revealed themselves! It revealed that we were spending way too much time on inbound demand, our sales reps are spending too much of their day prioritizing people who they shouldn't even be talking to and instead, they should be shifting the time towards being a bit more strategic about who they're reaching out to, having a bit more of a hunter mindset when it comes to new accounts, as opposed to a farmer mindset, or a fishing mindset, where things are just coming in. So, once we figured out that the overlap between the business model and the marketing strategy needs to be really strong, we were able to uncover a lot of problems and uncover a lot of opportunities for real.
Pritish: You spoke about founders earlier. If somebody has to start a marketing team, and Bootstrap with no budget, what would be a framework for that?
David: Oh, you can't really start from that point because there's so much context, you need to be able to answer that question, how much traction do they have how developed with the product? What I will say is that if you're a founder and you are pre product market fit, let's just call you're in the seed stage. Probably not the best idea to get a marketer yet because I think one way to think about marketing is marketers. One way about hiring marketers and marketers are really multipliers. So, if your precede or your seed, and you're not yet seeing predictable level of traction, you don't exactly know who you're selling to, it's not a great idea to get a marketer because that market is not going to be very useful to you until you have some traction or one channel that's working because then you can put that person on there and say, okay, now make this work better, make this engine more efficient.
So, that's the first thing I would say to anybody thinking about that. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but from my experience, you have other problems and you should spend your money elsewhere, probably on a product team. You probably need to be doing founder led sales at this point, etc. Later on, it gets really dependent. Your business model gets dependent on your own internal capability, and the expectations of your audience. So, for example, if you're selling to an enterprise segment, then you're probably going to need somebody who's had enterprise selling experience, it's going to be unlikely that you're selling to Fortune five hundreds, and then you hire somebody from Uber, or from Paytm. Just because they have a really good resume, it has to be relevant to your go to market.
Similarly, if you are in a B2B business, just because somebody worked at let's say, Salesforce or some big brand name, doesn't necessarily mean you'd hire them. So, my advice there, given the limited context is try to find somebody who is a good go to market fit for what you're doing, but also a good stage fit. So, don't hire somebody from a great brand company because they might be useful later on down the road when you're at 500 people. You want to find somebody who's really great at a fit for your own go to market, but also for a fit for your company stage. An early stage is a lot of chaos. So, you don't want to necessarily bring in somebody who's coming in from a safe, comfortable environment and then throw them into chaos, where you don't even have Google Analytics set up as an example.
Pritish: So, what is the magical ability of great marketer?
David: That's the question, I wish I do. I think my answer to that question and let me rephrase it this way. What is in common with all the best marketers that I work with? I think it is a few things. One is a consistent and relentless focus on making sure that marketing has impact on the business. Impact can be defined within the context of the company that they're serving, can it be direct impact on revenue. In some cases, that's possible? Is it brand awareness, maybe the way that marketing succeeds is brand awareness? Is it analyst relations, so maybe you're dealing with something where you need to be in the quadrant, the top Magic Quadrant, or the Forrester Wave or whatever?
So, it depends, but the point is impact a business and that impact is defined by however it is contextualized in the business that also the other stakeholders in the leadership team can appreciate. The other is they are really good at building teams and building teams is a big skill because it's comprised of a lot of sub skills. One is you need a good eye for talent, which means you need to have good taste and what good marketing looks like across a variety of disciplines. So, let's say you are just really good at SEO. You can't just be good only at SEO and expect to build a marketing team that includes marketing automation, that includes talking to sales, that includes paid ads, so, you're T shaped in a way that is meaningful. Let me just recap here.
So, really great marketing people I've worked with are good at aligning impact to business. The other is building a team and the other I would say is, the best way I can put it is like sharing narratives. I think one of the main functions that everybody expects in marketing is that the people who work in marketing should be good at communication because you're often the interface with the market. But also, you have an important role to play in being the glue between lots of different functions. So, oftentimes product will need to interface with marketing, and who will need to that interface with engineering, which sometimes need to interface with legal. So, outside of things that you own as a marketer, you have to influence a lot of different functions to do what you want to or to get what you need done.
Great marketers that I've worked with are good at sharing narratives and getting people pumped up and sharing what they have in their mind. But in such a way that's easily digestible to somebody who may not be doing the day-to-day marketing. So, they'll have a message that says something like we need to invest in our brand this year, something generic like that, they will translate that message in such a way that the product team gets excited in such a way that the legal team gets excited and supports them in whatever message. Then if they need to talk to the board, to the C suite, they have a digestible legible version of that, so that they can get backing and buy in from all those stakeholders that they have. So, I think it's those three that the great marketers have in common.
Pritish: You have also written about how marketing in 2021 is getting disrupted, or is different from a decade ago, in 2012 or 2016. So, can you double click on that?
David: I've talked a lot about this. I think what you might be referring to is how I'm thinking social media is more important than people expect. So, if that's not what you're referring to, just let me know. But one trend that I've noticed and I think a lot of marketers are picking up on this is there was this wave in 2011 to 2016, where marketing especially in B2B SaaS is about SEO, writing content, maybe running some ads, and then Email, and that's what marketing really is, especially in the tech space. A lot of people have not realized that the world has moved on from those. It's much more than those things. Now, imagine 2015, podcasts were a thing, but they were not really a thing. Social media was really being treated as a broadcast channel.
The point of social media back then, was to promote your blog, or to talk about things. It was like a broadcast channel, where I think so much has changed now, that social media and things like podcasts, things like YouTube, the channels by which we consume information have decentralized and fragmented in such a way that it is very difficult to get all of your audience in one spot. So, gone are the days where you could just run Facebook ads and get away with it. Because everybody was still using Facebook back then but it's a very different world now. So, as a marketer, you have to be hyper aware of what channels and how your target audience is changing their information diet and their media mix and you need to adapt as a result.
One big change that a lot of people are slow footed on or still living in the old world of is social media and thinking of it as the place where I post what I eat, or it's only run by interns. That's a very outdated way to think about it. Or it's a way for me to promote my blog and to promote all the other things that I do. Well, I think one of the reasons that people complain about LinkedIn so much, is because a lot of people think of it that way, oh, LinkedIn is a place where I can post about the good things that I'm doing. We're running a webinar, and I'm going to post up a webinar, or, hey, we rose this funding and click that. That's the only thing you post, we're just promoting yourself. Social media, especially in the business context, has really become a channel on its own. In some cases, it's more powerful than SEO, more powerful than your blog, depending on your business. So, that's one big shift that I've seen that the continuing decentralization and fragmentation of marketing channels that marketers need to be aware of, especially when it comes to their business.
Pritish: Brilliant! You talked about LinkedIn and I have this question for a very long time. I also probably have some observations about LinkedIn as well. I haven't seen anyone being able to disrupt LinkedIn or have a comparable social media site. Why is that?
David: Yeah, it's going to happen eventually, if you want it to happen, just be patient. Everything gets disrupted eventually, like, Facebook now feels like it is on the later stages of its adoption because generationally, they're just losing the younger cohort. So, it's inevitable that it's going to age out, and then we'll have something new, which is great. Something will happen and then LinkedIn will be replaced by something else. It's just inevitable. Nobody lasts forever. Do you want somebody to replace LinkedIn? Are you not happy with it? I'm just curious behind the question.
Pritish: Well, I'm happy with it. I think it's a great platform. But I also see that at the same time, I haven't seen anybody to be able to actually build something which is equally good or better and they have been around for more than a decade. But having said that Facebook over a period of time, within the same decade, has had multiple competitions, the different generations have actually adopted two new social media platforms. But LinkedIn has stayed where it is. There is no other alternative if you want to actually professionally connect or showcase yourself other than LinkedIn, on a global scale.
David: Yeah. I think the competitor to LinkedIn is going to look very different than LinkedIn. So, in some of my circles, I'm finding that Twitter is actually a replacement to LinkedIn and that sounds very strange. But what's happening is, there's this trend that I think is only going to accelerate over time, where your social media audience size is more important than your resume. Because it's an indicator that you have put skin in the game that you are trying and learning and that you have some influence. Imagine if I'm a founder at an early-stage startup, and I hire somebody, and have a choice between hiring somebody who has 100,000 followers on Twitter or LinkedIn, whoever their platform versus somebody who has let's call it 5000. Now I need to promote a webinar or I need to promote something. It's going to be so much cheaper for me to do that.
If I have somebody on my team that has 100,000 followers versus somebody who has 5000 followers, yes, that 5000 can build up their your following whatever. But if everything else is kind of equal. So, that's an example of how I think the next LinkedIn is not going to look like LinkedIn. It could be that Twitter becomes the next LinkedIn or Instagram becomes the next LinkedIn. I think it fragments again, continuing this trend of decentralization, which is like web three, if you follow in into all of that. The current era we're living in is web 2.0, where social media and networks and platforms are centralized and so, it's going to be decentralized the next wave, and whatever that's going to look like, I don't know, but it's going to be an exciting time and I think LinkedIn is going to be around for a while. Everybody still needs a place to put the work history, and it's just the neatest place to do it and it's not offensive. I was talking to somebody the other day, around how much time they spend on different social media platforms. People say that they spend a lot of time LinkedIn, because it's the least toxic, it's the least emotionally volatile. Twitter is a rage machine. Instagram is full of people making you jealous and Facebook is also a rage machine, but also not amazing in terms of what it does to your emotions. There's been so much stuff written about, but LinkedIn, yeah, it's harmless. So, I think it'll be around for a while. But it will be actually be disrupted by something, just what that thing is and what form it takes. I think it is going to be an interesting thing to watch as it plays out.
Pritish: I think you made a quite a striking and a clever observation. You said that B2B specifically SAS companies, or B2B startups, businesses think that LinkedIn is the place to market. But actually, that may not be true, because as you mentioned, if somebody is on Instagram, as CMO or CTO, so while he's calling, he doesn't turn off his hat of being a CTO, CMO. So, business marketing can also be on platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, not only LinkedIn.
David: Yeah, absolutely and it goes back to what I said earlier about if you're a marketer, one of the first things you have to find out is what is the information diet of the people that you're trying to reach. What media do they consume, and then work backwards from there? So, one of the things people do is the opposite. They say, hey, B2B, LinkedIn equals B2B. Therefore, if a B2B customer can only use LinkedIn, so, it's just weird, they're starting from the wrong place and ends up with a lot of weird conclusions you would do in your marketing. If you're listening to this and you resonate with that, you should be happy that a lot of people have this default thinking because that opens up an opportunity for one of the things, we did at HubSpot is recognize this, and knew that B2B leaders were on Instagram and Facebook.
So, we advertised the hell out of our stuff on Instagram and Facebook, and we build up a YouTube page, because obviously, everybody's on YouTube. So, it's a missed opportunity for a lot of people who just think, oh, yes, B2B equals white papers and native advertising on forbs. Fine, keep doing that. While you do that, we are going to work backwards from our information diet of our target customer, and then be in the places where they're already spending a lot of time.
Pritish: On the same note, can you double click on one of the pieces, written that HubSpot marketing strategy is weird, but it really works! So, what does that really mean?
David: Yeah, I just alluded to it just now where it looks counterintuitive. Why would HubSpot have a YouTube channel? What is that might seem weird to a lot of people because you might associate YouTube with like vloggers or like music videos that you wouldn't your first thought when you think of YouTube is not necessarily B2B Marketing, Business Content. At least that's not my association and I worked at HubSpot. So, it's weird, because it thinks of nurturing people and building affinity with a target audience over a much longer timescale than most marketing teams, where most marketing teams, because of perhaps an outdated way of thinking about marketing, or because the pressure they're getting from leadership to show results, really has to think on a quarterly basis or a yearly basis.
If your stuff doesn't have an impact within this year, this quarter this month, then you're not an effective marketer. Whereas I think at HubSpot, we were blessed by having a longer-term vision that just said, we're going to invest in our target audience, we're going to educate them, we are going to show them and hopefully shape their marketing worldview or their sales worldview. When time comes for them to make a buying decision that maybe involves HubSpot, they're going to have much more affinity for us, they're going to trust us and because we've had a hand in shaping their worldview, we probably the top of the list, when it comes time for them to make a decision or champion us internally. In addition, most of their team will have heard of HubSpot.
So, when it comes down to a head-to-head showdown between, hey, this tool that I found when I was Googling versus HubSpot, which we all know about, HubSpot in that situation has more familiarity, as more trust. Therefore, what we saw was just there's a more bias towards that because we're taking advantage of these things where we're building trust over the long term. It makes sense when I say this is very hard to do in practice, because you have to be comfortable with doing things that don't pay off, will never pay off on a spreadsheet. So, that's an unfair advantage at HubSpot had, leadership was very comfortable with that. We were able to do things that look counterintuitive, maybe strange, and maybe weird. But because they're weird, that means nobody's doing them.
Pritish: You have actually written about Afterpay and Zoom and their hockey stick growth. Can you share some insights from the framework that you learned and you have discussed?
David: Yeah, Afterpay and Zoom are really great examples of a new buzzword that are we talking about product led growth, where they didn't grow necessarily because of a blitz and marketing or because they hadn't. It's basically the product was just so good and then nailed the target audience that they were able to organically grow from there. So, enough to base case, while everybody else in the Buy Now pay later was going after high ticket items like electronics, which makes it expensive, hits our cash flow. So, therefore you want to split it up, split that up in installments so that it makes it easier for you to manage. After B2B, we're actually going to go after a segment that is cheap products, but high frequency and they ended up going after the fashion vertical because the founders had some previous history with that world and because of those, and in addition to a really good product, like nail their ICP, and also nail their product, they had crazy word of mouth within that community and because they had a crazy word of mouth, they could use that as leverage to get partnerships and expand into other verticals
Zoom similarly was the same thing. First of all, this is a great product like it works. One of the things that I think is hilarious when it comes to thinking about Zoom is, we were already all using Skype. Skype was a verb already. We were sitting Skyping to each other. We had been using Skype for a decade. Yet, we were all unsatisfied with Skype, which is why it was so easy to switch over to zoom. Now zoom is the new verb, so, the product was just really good. But also, they nailed their core audience of tech ecosystem startups, because they started in Silicon Valley and then they had that base of leverage. Once they did that, it was much easier to expand into other verticals. So, those two things are much easier said than done nailing your ICP, sometimes it's by luck, sometimes it's engineered, and then just having a really good product. I think the two things those companies have in common is that the founders understood the pain extremely well on the product teams understood the pain really well enough to base case they came from fashion and ecommerce and understood the psychology around making transactions. In Xoops case, like Eric Yuen used to be at Cisco, where he was working on WebEx, and so, he understood all the nooks and crannies of it. So, products like growth and ICP are really hitting it on the bull's eye, the things that made those two companies skyrocket.
Pritish: As an APEC director, which has such a heterogeneous market, how does one need to think about marketing across different markets? How would you think about it? How would you build a team to manage such different markets?
David: Yeah, this is a tough question. I don't know if I figured out the answer. But one thing I've definitely seen in my own experiences when I've talked to people who have done a better job than me and figure out APEC is avoid the first mistake of doing anything in APEC. The first mistake is thinking of APEC as a thing. There's technically no such thing as APEC because, first of all, there are so many different definitions. The fact is, are you talking about Japan and there is China involved? Is India involved? Is Australia involved? So, first of all, you have to be very clear on what APEC means because depending on the company, APEC means different, sometimes APEC equals Middle East, which is just speaks to my point about APEC, you have to break that down. That's the first thing you have to do.
Once you've broken it down, then you'll realize you can apply this same go to market or marketing strategy to all those countries. Japan is very different from Australia. The Philippines is very different from Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. Yes, they're neighbours, but they're extremely different. So, your first level is the thing, okay, there's no such thing as APEC. The next level is to prioritize the different markets, which one is the priority that is going to have the best impact on your company's growth or whatever goal you have. Then from there, you can start to build a team, you can start to think about go to market. In some cases, you might think about clustering countries together. In some cases, you might just think we are only going after Singapore; we are only going after Indonesia. Then after some time, we will decide to expand. So, that's the way to think about APEC marketing and going out to the tactics is almost trivial at that point, because you've done the hard work of prioritizing and cutting down the scope, so, it's something that justifiably, you can take action on.
Pritish: Tell us why on deck? How do you see it adding value and you transitioning from HubSpot to On Deck?
David: Oh man! Yeah, the first time I heard about on deck and when they reached out for a role, I was like; this is the weirdest idea, why would anybody do this? I just totally did not get it. Because as some of the listeners may know, I run a community for APEC marketing people so I get the whole community and its hard work. It's really hard. I think we've all had that experience of being in a community Slack team face A group WhatsApp group, LinkedIn group, and it's usually one of two problems. One is its way too noisy. It's just like webinar invite is left here. I wrote this blog post, hey, I'm hiring. It's just so noisy and typically if it's a marketing group, people are just promoting their stuff left, right, like marketers are awful ruining these kinds of things.
The opposite problem is that nothing happens in there. It's completely dead. You get into a Slack team, you go into LinkedIn group, and people are introducing themselves and that's it. There are no conversations happening other than, hi, I'm so glad to be here, and it's dead. So, I know communities are hard and thankfully, at APEC, marketer’s roundtable, we've avoided that fate. For now, I'm doing my best. I just know that it's hard. Now On Deck comes along and says, hey, we are building a business on communities. I'm like; this is the hardest potential business, why would you do this? So, I just thought it was really silly. But then the more I dug into it, and the more the more information they shared, I might have realized that it's actually the future.
So, it was inevitable and I had to join because if you think about it, there are a lot of ways to describe on deck. Okay, but here's my go to explanation, especially I think, for the way you described your audience. Imagine the reason somebody would take an MBA. Okay, why would they take an MBA? They probably want to get some information, or get educated, learn about stuff. I think the majority people would say is they want to level up their network, they want to meet new people, that's going to be a lifelong business contact, or even friends or life partners, there are a lot of people who got married through MBA.
So, typically, it's those who have a different experience, they want to move to a different city with our MBAs and the concept of universities was really made. Man, let's call it the 1700s 1800s, that is when they were made. However, we are now living in a virtual world, especially in COVID times, and if you just think about that jobs to be done, and you unbundle that on but all those things, what if you had to solve for those things in a 2021 way. I doubt your answer would be let us set up a campus somewhere with buildings and force people to come here and make them attend classes in person. This is not the way I didn't charge them, our mental life to do it, and make them leave their jobs. That is just not the way you would solve that problem.
So, On Deck is a place where you can learn from top tier people. So, we get people to come into a cohort of people, and then teach them things. But the primary way that On Deck adds value is that we bring together a community of people that you want to learn from. So, if you go to www.beondeck.com, right now, you'll find that we have communities for founders. So, people who are just exploring starting up, or people who are already in a startup and want to have find their tribe of other founders who are like them, there's a community for that. There's a community for people who want to be angel investors. So, right now, if you want to be surrounded by a community of smart people like you who are angel investing, you can just go down the list, we're eventually going to have communities for every job title in tech.
So, let's say you're a customer success manager, you can join on deck customer success, and you can join other leaders, etc. So, one of the reasons I joined is just because we are now in a world where if you want to build your community and find your tribe, it's much easier to do that online. In fact, it's much better, because you can now have access to a global community of people as opposed to people who physically want to go to Stanford or physically want to go to one of the IITs as an example. So, your community, your reach in depth, and quality of community can be much better and then we can just deliver information in a much better way. We have speakers, if you go to a university, the professor could be good, but are they the best in the world; we can actually get you the best in the world speaking to you about your specific topic.
So, that's one of the reasons I joined, it's going to be the future of education, it's going to be the future of communities and especially within the startup space, we're doing a lot of exciting stuff. If you think about for example, if you want to start a company right now, you have to find co-founder, you have to raise funds, and you have to hire a team. With community like On Deck, all that is a lot easier because our founder programme, guess what that connects to our angel investor programme, which connects to our marketing programme, which connects to our CSM programme.
So, now all those things allow you to build a really rich ecosystem of different communities centered on this founder building a company ecosystem and that allows you to build a lot of really rich experiences depending on what people are solving for. So, long story short, it is really exciting to me, just because I think it's the future of communities in the future of how people are going to do personal development and build their careers and it's just really weird. I'm really into it just because I think it's like the new wave. If you remember my earlier point about decentralization as a trend that we are now going through agnostic of sectors or web three certainly is like the current umbrella theme for this. But you're seeing it in every single thing.
I think decentralization of communities is going to be a major part of how we do business in the next five to 10 years, decentralization of information. So, there are a lot of reasons to be excited that we're working on On Deck. I think you had a point about circulations and what I said at the beginning of the show, which is, there are a lot of marketers who think about best practices, but we're really getting learning’s from Europe or Silicon Valley, there's no reason for you to only be restricted to the people who are in those markets. They're really smart. I'm not saying they're not smart, and we shouldn't learn from them; we can learn from them. But there's also a tribe of really smart people in Asia. So, it's our part of our duties to connect the internet together.
One way we think about it is like Silicon Valley, there's always talking about what is the next Silicon Valley and people think its China, I think it's a wrong way to think about it. The team thinks is the wrong way, think about the next Silicon Valley is not going to be in a city, it's going to be in the cloud, where it's really the internet, is the place where all these connections are going to be met in the region is not going to matter. So, to answer your question about why Asia is on the internet, there are a lot of smart people on the internet, we would want to connect them all together, get them in communities that they care about, so they can all go forward together.
Pritish: And that is a great place to close this conversation. David it was a pleasure having under 1% project.
David: Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.