Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. It's my pleasure. What we're going to be doing with this episode, is we're going to be digging real deep into all things paid growth, which we've never done on this podcast yet. And normally I actually skip this part, but I thought it'd be actually helpful for you to spend a little bit of time to give us a little bit of background on your experience in the space of performance marketing, AKA paid growth, AKA paid ads. You tell us what the right term is for this genre. But yeah, just tell us what you've been up to in this area over the past decade and a half, I think. Sure. No, that's a great way to kick things off. And again, thank you for having me here. If I think about it, my experience goes back about 15 years into this space. I started off as a web developer. And as I built and structured websites for people, I became pretty obsessed and fascinated with the fact that you could build landing pages or homepages, or whatever it was. Basically the content on a website, and structure it in a manner where you had the chance to surface in organic, so SEO results more prominently. And as I became a practitioner of SEO, SEO really being my first love of marketing, I started attracting attention and people wanted to hire me on as a freelancer. And what I noticed is that as people started asking me questions like, what was the ROI of our SEO campaign? Or, how do I scale this, or whatnot? The answers to their questions ended up being a lot more aligned with what then was the biggest driver in the paid acquisition world, which was paid search. And so I started experimenting with paid search. And what I found was that it was a tangible format and lever through which we could basically give people the types of results they were expecting from SEO, but that were obfuscated in terms of Google's analysis algorithm from an organic point of view being somewhat intangible. And Google slowly removing a lot of the data early on that allowed you to guess and test more easily. 10 plus years later, what started off as this freelancer consultancy that I started running in a walk-in closet in my old apartment, became 130 people. And we manage about $500 million a year in ad spend for small and large companies, including Uber, Asana, Tempur-Pedic. We've worked with Lululemon. Very exciting companies, mostly from the United States, even though we randomly happen to be based in Vancouver, Canada.…

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