Growth Strategies in a Turbulent Market

Presenter – 00:00:01: Welcome to Startup Success, the podcast for startup founders and investors. Here you’ll find stories of success from others in the trenches as they work to scale some of the fastest growing startups in the world. Stories that will help you in your own journey. Startup Success starts now.

Kate Adams – 00:00:19: Welcome to startup success. Today we have Keith Delaney in the studio who is the founder and CEO of Primer. Keith. Welcome to Startup Success.

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:00:30: Thanks so much for having me.

Kate Adams – 00:00:32: Thank you for being here. I want to talk about Primer and everything you’re up to now because it’s very exciting. But first I want to walk through some of your background and most importantly though, start with something that’s really relevant to founders listening and that is we’re in a down economy. We’re not sure what’s going to play out in terms of the next six months with the economy and the sales cycle has been impacted and it’s more challenging than recent years and you’ve had some experience with this, so I’d love to get your thoughts and delve into that to start.

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:01:09: Because Primer kind of plays in the marketing and sales SaaS space. We see that with our customers constantly. That is like a continuous refrain. How do we continue to grow? How do we grow more efficiently? It’s definitely a topic we’ve been giving a lot of thought to.

Kate Adams – 00:01:26: And how do you advise those that are asking you that? What are some of the strategies you recommend?

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:01:32: It’s actually really interesting because I think that what’s happened with software being in a recession is bringing more attention to something that I think was actually true, some structural things that were true before we hit this downturn, but it’s exacerbating. Let me paint a picture for a second.

Kate Adams – 00:01:53: Okay.

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:01:54: Before the downturn, you were seeing a ton of startups pop up, right? Like an explosion of SaaS. We’re on the downward side of this industrial revolution kind of bell curve and you have a huge emphasis on PLG. You just had tons of companies fighting for the same number of people’s attention. So more competition you saw. At the same time, some foundational changes happening with how companies kind of get discovered by prospective customers like Gmail and Outlook are making it a lot harder to crack the inbox and have reliable outbound email delivery. iOS 14 from Apple.

Kate Adams – 00:02:40: And you’re painting a picture that I’m quite familiar with. I like it.

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:02:44: It kind of looks like people from an advertising standpoint.

Kate Adams – 00:02:47: Yes.

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:02:49: So it was getting harder already and then the old school kind of B2B demand gen playbook of let’s produce a bunch of content, put it out there, hope somebody clicks, visits our website, we nurture them. That’s just getting kind of played out, right? It’s experiencing a lot of click throughs. Should I explain what a “lot of click through” is?

Kate Adams – 00:03:09: Yes, actually that would be great because I’m like should I ask? Because I don’t know, I’m in marketing. But I’m thinking, I don’t know if everybody listening knows, so please do because I love it.

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:03:19: Andrew, I think Andrew Chen, who is Andreessen and was Uber’s main group guy for a lot of time, coined this term, I believe. But he points out whenever something new is introduced into the marketing landscape, the click through rate of it is initially amazing. Right. Back in the early 2000s, everybody clicked on banner ads. It was like a 20, 30% click through rate. Now you’re lucky if it’s like 0.1%. Right? So every channel experiences that over time. It’s part of what makes marketing really hard because it’s constantly shifting underneath your feet. But that has been happening with a lot of traditional approaches to generating growth and demand. So these things were happening, but something else really powerful was happening too at the same time, which was the VC world is a wash in free money. So it doesn’t really matter because you can just spend more, spend more, spend more to acquire customers. And we’ll figure it out at some point how to make it efficient at some point when efficiency matters. Now efficiency matters, right? So I think a lot of people, like, the pendulum has swung so drastically in the other direction that I’m trying to think of a good analogy. It’s just like whiplash. People are really wrestling with what do I do? How do I do things differently? So that’s the picture.

Kate Adams – 00:04:39: You painted it very well. It’s the story of my life. Anybody in marketing, right? So we’re constantly looking for the next channel.

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:04:47: So for the founders out there, be kind to your marketers, because you’re asking a lot of them right now. Always, but in particular right now. So I’ll tell you how our customers start doing things differently. Tell me if it resonates.

Kate Adams – 00:05:01: Okay.

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:05:03: So your budget is constrained. People are less responsive. Every dollar that you spend, every resource that you deploy has to have more impact than it had before. So with that, how do I predict and plan and figure out where to invest those resources? That becomes the starting point. And then the answer to that, which is like, this is old school marketing as a premise, but it always starts with your customers. And I think brand marketers talk about that a lot. Product marketers talk about that a lot. But there’s more and more opportunity to be really, really data driven about it. So it starts by not coming up with some fuzzy, ICP definition, Ideal Customer Profile. It’s looking at your highest ACV customers backing into the attributes of them, using that to begin to hone in, okay, here’s where we need to focus. Here’s where we win, here’s why we win. And then going out and identifying more of those types of companies and orienting all of your efforts in that direction. It’s pushing people that were considering the movement towards account based marketing down that road even faster. And it’s why companies like Six Cents and some AVM players are doing very well despite the economy. with them? How did they traditionally convert? And then getting in, like honing your strategy around that and then making sure you leave room for experimentation. Because you can’t not continue to experiment. You just have to do it in tighter cycles. I think that’s the key. I’ve seen a lot more folks adopt growth sprints, which I think a lot of the best companies were already doing. But more and more early stage companies are beginning to operate in that similar vein. As a result, they’re like, kind of building that experimentation muscle, which allows them to get signal faster and then decide if they double down. We’re going to come up with this quarterly plan, and then we’re going to wait and see. And then, oh, we missed it this quarter, so we’re going to extend it another quarter. Like, that doesn’t apply anymore. That feedback loop has to be a lot shorter and a lot faster, which I think is good rigor.

Kate Adams – 00:07:24: Excellent. I couldn’t agree more. Like you said, you always have to keep experimenting, but it’s got to be tighter. You’ve got to be faster to pivot and change and listen to the feedback. But then, like you said in the beginning, going back to the core of marketing with your customer and then messaging and positioning directly to them, like, those fundamentals that we all learned very early on are so important right now. So I couldn’t agree more. And you’re so knowledgeable, and I want to share with the audience some of your experiences. Dropbox, Eden, talk through those because everybody listening, knows those names and kind of your roles. There lessons learned and how you’re applying that. We’ll get into it later. Subprimer, if you wouldn’t mind.

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:08:17: Yeah, happy to. But one thing I want to say, I think for the last at least five years, people have been leading with the channel.

Kate Adams – 00:08:26: Channel. I was just going to say that, yes.

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:08:28: We need to invest in LinkedIn, or we need to write Facebook or we’ve got to spin up Outbound.

Kate Adams – 00:08:33: Or TikTok. That’s what everyone yes, we need to be on TikTok now and again, it’s the channel. Let’s just take a step back. What about our customer and TikTok?

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:08:43: It makes me kind of want to go back to old school media buying.

Kate Adams – 00:08:47: Yes.

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:08:48: Where do people spend? Who are our most valuable customers and where are they spending our time? And what’s the path to conversion for them? And then how do we build that into our new growth loop? And that is actually a good segue in a Dropbox. That was like early, before reforge, before a lot of the talks of Rias contractor and branch. That was the kind of the center of that environment. Talking about growth loops and the development of those. So it was really cool to learn that at the epicenter of it at the time when it was forming into like a methodology and a way of thinking about the kind of link between product and growth and marketing. So that was sort of my first foray into tech and it was amazing. And then the company got bigger and I wanted to go smaller, so I just wanted to eat in. Right. When I graduated from Y Combinator and helped scale them, that was like another interesting opportunity to replicate the growth function of a company like Dropbox, but much earlier stage startup. And that’s when I realized, like, wow, the power of all of this kind of growth engineering resource that we had at Dropbox. To pull all these disparate data sets together and enable all these motions, that is actually the secret sauce behind most of outside of product, right? Behind Samsara’s success, behind Rippling’s success, behind Ramp’s success, behind all these startups. They’re foundationally built on how do I gather and centralize as much of the relevant data as possible and then deploy that across my marketing and sales motions.

Kate Adams – 00:10:37: Really well said. You’re doing that so well at Dropbox. And I get to go on to your next challenge because that’s something I love to do as well. I hear you say you joined Eden right after they came out of Y Combinator.

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:10:53: Yes.

Kate Adams – 00:10:54: How fun. So you were there for the ride. So then how do you make that happen there? You were ahead of growth, right?

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:11:02: It was really a lot of like duct tape and glue and village in Pakistan that I was supporting via Upwork. Basically, you try to take the framework of the system and build it however you can with the resources that you have. So it’s about making trade offs and accepting inefficiencies where it’s possible. I’ll give you an example. We tested our way into this is six, seven years ago, five years ago. So Outbound Cold email engines were still really effective, right?

Kate Adams – 00:11:36: They were working then.

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:11:37: We’re working. Really the bar to making them work was certainly a lot lower. That was great. We got this engine humming, but then it was like, we need to feed the beast. Like, how do we get more records? Right? We just got to go deeper into how do we stack these databases on top of each other to increase our coverage amongst our target market. Because Incrementally Apollo, back when they were Zen Prospect, has this much coverage. If you layer on a scraper, you can get 30% more. Then you layer on another database, you can get some X percent more. Then all of a sudden you’ve got maybe 80% of your tam, your ICP kind of accessible and reachable via email. That’s really powerful. Didn’t have a data engineer to do that, so just kind of hacked it together. Right? Safe, your Google Sheets, offshore teams, whatever you make it work. Those are the kinds of the scrappy things that I think early stage startups have to do. And it’s the fun and the joy of being in it currently.

Kate Adams – 00:12:34: Well said. And so then now all this experience. Tell us about Primer.

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:12:40: Primer was kind of born out of that. We had a bunch of work emails and it was sort of like, well, I can upload them to LinkedIn and I can turn them into an ad audience on LinkedIn, and then I can start serving ads to the same people I’m emailing. And wouldn’t it be great if I could turn that into a Facebook audience? How do I do that? Well, grab the recruiting tool and enrich the list with personal emails using Chrome plugin for finding folks personal emails. If I enrich these with just some personal emails, my match rate on Facebook goes from 10% using a work email to more like 40%. All of a sudden, Facebook is a viable channel for us to reach our audience. These learnings about how connecting data together, how that can unlock new growth motions and new channels, became the premise for Primer. So what we’re doing is trying to provide that data engineering off the shelf for go to market team. So you need to Stack, Apollo and Zoom info on top of each other to increase your depth of coverage of your ICP. That’s something that you can just do inside of Primer. You need to mix that with your salesforce data and push it to an ad audience on Facebook. You can do that inside of Primer leveragement and funding data from Harmonic. So it’s sort of like an orchestration platform for all those B2B data sources that power a lot of the market teams.

Kate Adams – 00:14:04: That’s fantastic because back when I was at a B2B startup, I remember saying if we could just take the data from both and somehow connect it, we would be able to target our audience so efficiently. So that’s what you’re doing for your clients.

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:14:22: Again, I think a lot of later stage organizations build this themselves, right? And that was what I know, talking to friends in this space. Well, let’s make that accessible for the Series A, Series B startup as well. Or maybe the ones that aren’t Silicon Valley based.

Kate Adams – 00:14:37: Right, that don’t have the teams to make that happen themselves. So who are your customers primarily like? SAS series A, Series B startups.

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:14:48: Yeah, series D. Not everybody thinks with that sort of aggressive growth data engineering mindset of some of the companies that I mentioned, we’re serving lots of. But that doesn’t mean that their marketing teams don’t have that same instinct, right? They just don’t have the resources. We work with companies like Ironclad, Air, Twin Gate.

Kate Adams – 00:15:14: Fun. So is each interaction with the client like a project that your team is rolling out through Primer? Or are there kind of standard things that you can do within Primer?

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:15:25: You can sign up.

Kate Adams – 00:15:27: Okay, good. And so we always kind of wrap up the show with advice for founders. You’ve been in a founding role now for how many years?

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:15:38: Three years.

Kate Adams – 00:15:40: Okay. So we love to ask founders to share some advice that they’ve gleaned along the way. It’s one of our most popular parts of the show. So anything you could share for those listening would be great.

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:15:54: Have a co-founder that compliments you never solo found, which helps of my friends are listening to this. Actually. This is going to be maybe some more cliches, which is everything takes longer than you think it will. The best thing you can do, make trade offs with a lot of discipline. The best thing you can do is validate your hypotheses with data as fast as possible and then don’t be too hard on yourself when you make bets and they don’t work out because that will happen a lot.

Kate Adams – 00:16:29: Those are not cliches. I mean, it’s a running theme. We hear a lot of people say you’re like a scientist, you’re experimenting, listen to the data and cut yourself some slack when you have to change it sounds like you’ve experienced that yourself.

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:16:45: Yeah. Being a founder is like there’s so much of yourself is wrapped up in it, so much of your pride or sense of self worth that you take those wins really personally. But you can also take those losses a little personally. And I’ve had to learn how to check my ego a bunch and all of this in a lot of different ways.

Kate Adams – 00:17:04: That makes sense. So if I’m listening and I want to find out more about Primer, what’s the best way to do that and some resources that you have available.

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:17:15: Check out safeprimer.com, that’s our website. And then please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Keith Bundabilini, our blog has actually lot of articles on this topic of how to grow and this down market, what the right Martex stack looks like for an early stage start up? All kinds of things that we’ve got cleaned from the last, like I said, decade of doing this in tech.

Kate Adams – 00:17:40: Yeah, right. Excellent. Well, I will have to check that out. And speaking of channel, we are always looking about founders and where they are LinkedIn. They’re all LinkedIn. Thank you Keith for being here. It was really fun chatting with you.

Keith Putnam-Delaney – 00:17:54: Yeah. Back at you, Keith. Thanks so much for having me.

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