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Zero-to-One Marketing with Peter Farago · Founder Mode

• 0:00
  I'd say the biggest word, the biggest single word that I think
• 0:03
  is the most important word, which is also probably going to
• 0:06
  be a relief to people dealing with the question of will AAI
• 0:10
  replace my job? AI won't replace your job, it'll
• 0:12
  change your job. But empathy is the word that's,
• 0:15
  in my mind, a big difference between a good market and a good
• 0:17
  product person. Is it empathy?
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  Can you put yourself in the shoes of that customer?
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  Welcome to founder Mode. What's up, Kevin?
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  How are you buddy? Good to see you.
• 0:36
  I'm good. I'm excited.
• 0:37
  Today we're diving into one of the most critical and sometimes
• 0:40
  confusing phases for any startup zero to 1 marketing.
• 0:44
  We don't have that Peter on. We have a different Peter on the
• 0:47
  show today and I'm pretty excited about it.
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  What do we actually need to get those first critical users when
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  you have no team, no budget, maybe barely a product?
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  I'm just excited to hear from this guy.
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  He's somebody that you know, are you, are you fired up?
• 1:00
  Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it's easy to get
• 1:02
  overwhelmed by all the marketing advice out there.
• 1:04
  And I think it's one of those things if you start searching,
• 1:06
  the algo feeds you more than you want to know.
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  And I think it doesn't just apply to when you're starting
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  out. I mean, like there's constantly
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  the markets changing and what the market wants to hear and
• 1:14
  what the market wants to see and sort of being able to pick up
• 1:18
  those signals and then being able to make the right
• 1:21
  adjustments and adjust to, you know, how to go do that.
• 1:23
  And so I think it's the perfect sort of, you know, kick off to
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  somebody who's, you know, at any stage of the company, but I
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  think it's it really means the most when you're just starting
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  out and you sort of have that resource sort of constraint to
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  work through. Yeah, that's right.
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  And and as a career marketing and growth guy, I'm I'm
• 1:38
  particularly excited about this episode.
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  And what I think is cool is, you know, you and I are like, you
• 1:43
  know, the yin and Yang and in the startup plan, like you got
• 1:46
  to figure out your product. That's you, and you got to
• 1:48
  figure out your distribution. And that's me.
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  So when we're thinking about marketing in the context of a
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  technical founder like yourself, what are you looking for?
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  What do you think? Like when you are interviewing
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  marketers or kind of getting presented a marketing plan,
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  they're like, hey, I'm going to do this stuff.
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  What's going through your head? Yeah.
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  And I'm, I'm kind of a, a quiet marketer, like a technical nerd
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  on this stuff. So like to me, the big thing is
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  just tracking like do you know that it's working?
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  So some sort of attribution, some sort of understanding of,
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  you know, is what we're sending out there going.
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  And then the other thing I'm looking for is are you testing
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  enough things quick enough? And then is there a feedback
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  loop? And so for me, it's like, hey,
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  let's try a bunch of stuff. Let's not spend a lot of time on
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  those things, track them so we understand it and then feed that
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  back in so that we can kind of learn and double down on the
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  ones that are working. Yeah, I love that.
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  I mean, for Jason, I mean, this is your jam.
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  Like marketing is your thing. And so, you know, for tech folks
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  out there like, you know, what do you think about this and and
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  how is that and how is AI changing this?
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  I mean, we talk about this a lot on this show, but in particular
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  AI is transformative and highly disruptive to marketing and
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  marketing teams and marketers. And we'll talk, we'll talk to
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  Peter when we when we interview him.
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  But there's this fear that, well, I'm a copywriter or I'm a
• 3:02
  content marketer or I'm a designer and, you know, these
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  tools are going to take my job. No, they're not.
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  Can I can tell you from personal experience that what's happening
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  is the people that are crushing it right now are using these
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  tools to make themselves superhuman.
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  They're taking the image generation and allowing it to
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  create all sorts of concepts and ideas as a designer and then
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  iterating on those. So now instead of doing, you
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  know, one really cool brand concept for a client, you can do
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  a dozen at this in the same amount of time.
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  And and AI hopes you do that. If you're a content marketer or
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  copywriter, instead of like slaving over the exact wording
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  you want to use, you use AI to generate ideas for you and then
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  turn those ideas into written concepts that you human writer
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  helped craft and shape and and give give an essence to.
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  And so those are specific creative examples.
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  And I think on the growth strategy and marketing strategy,
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  go to market, product marketing, it all still applies.
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  AI is a super accelerator of ideas and helps you be your
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  sparring partner as a marketer to figure out what to do and do
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  it faster. Yeah, I think of a lot as just
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  having like a, a team of like really excited junior interns in
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  your in your exactly, you know, stable, right.
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  You're like sitting at the table and now instead of like being
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  alone at the white border, just two people in the room.
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  You've got a team with energy around it.
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  And you just need to know how to harness that energy and make
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  sure that you, you know, keep the things on track.
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  The feedback that it gives the, you know, those tools are not
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  perfect, but so sometimes you have to direct them.
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  But having that sort of additional sort of weapon to
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  use, I think it's been pretty impactful for where I've seen it
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  go so far. I totally agree.
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  And I know that you feel the same way about what it's doing
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  for engineering. And so I think it it this is
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  just going to happen across every discipline, whether you're
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  a a marketer or you're a software engineer or you're a
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  product manager, embrace the tools, embrace the innovation
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  happening the pace of it. I was reading the the things
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  that Sam Altman wish he had known sooner list.
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  So it always makes the rounds right on social.
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  I see the you know, the ex post and like I you know, I reread it
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  again, I think this morning and one of the things was like, if
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  you move fast, you can make a lot more mistakes and like AI is
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  just making you move faster, like it get it gives you more
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  shots on goal, right. So we're going to talk to Peter
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  today. I would love to know, you know,
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  the things that you and he worked on together in the
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  accompli days, you know, pre AI hustle, like what's the stuff
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  that really jumped out for you and you know that you feel like
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  this is what good marketing is. This is what a good marketer.
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  Yeah. And so I mean, Peter and I work
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  together Accompli, you know, he ran marketing for us and I think
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  a bunch of really cool campaigns.
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  We did a pretty cool video that hopefully we'll have time to
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  talk about. We did this Rock the doc
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  campaign where it was like this, a screenshot of Accompli, the
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  app in your doc, you're kind of like bottom 4 on your iPhone and
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  then post that to Twitter. And this is like in the days
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  where like going viral on Twitter was very different than
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  it is today. And I think the other thing that
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  Peter was incredibly good at was just, you know, a great sparring
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  partner on content and Wordsmansmith.
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  He had this like art with the pen and that was always like
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  this sort of incredible thing. But again, it was, you know, we
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  were hustling, man. We were trying to figure out, we
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  weren't really sure. You know, we had to build
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  websites and WordPress and setting all this stuff up.
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  And so we had a lot of interaction from engineering and
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  marketing of like how to set this up, how to do tracking, I
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  mean, how to work 3rd. And it was just really fun to
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  kind of go through that and work with him on it.
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  That's a perfect segue, Kevin. We've got Peter Farrago with us
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  today. Peter is a seasoned marketing
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  leader who has navigated the zero to one phase multiple
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  times, including as CMO with you at Accompli where he worked
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  alongside awesome team that then led to a $200 million plus
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  acquisition from Microsoft. He also LED marketing at Flurry
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  Analytics through its acquisition by Yahoo.
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  And if anyone knows what really matters in early stage
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  marketing, both pre and post AI buzz, it's definitely Peter.
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  So let's get into it. Peter, welcome to Founder Mode.
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  Hey, how's it going? Nice to meet you.
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  It's great, great to have you and great to meet you as well.
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  And you and Kevin known each other a minute, but we're we're
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  new friends. You've seen marketing evolve
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  like pretty dramatically over the 20 plus years you've been in
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  the Valley, especially in those early days when you hear zero to
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  1 marketing, what's like the core, you know, first principle
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  stuff that comes to mind for you and for these founders that are
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  listening to us today. I think it's know your audience,
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  know the value you're trying to describe to them, say it in the
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  words that that audience wants to hear or needs to have it told
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  to them. I think those are the core
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  things. You know, people will talk about
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  value proposition and messaging and positioning, and that's all
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  true, but I think it starts with understanding that audience and
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  the value you're bringing them and expressing that really well.
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  You're going to keep trying to express that several different
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  ways. There'll be lots of iterations
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  and lots of different ways you do it, but that's the key.
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  Great to have you on. I mean, thinking back to our
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  accompli days, it's been a minute.
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  We were jumping into like this crazy crowded market, right?
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  There was, you know, 50 e-mail apps.
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  If you remember what was the first marketing move we made
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  Like before we even have a polished product, you know,
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  trying to, you know, nothing was really ready, like just trying
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  to figure it out. Like how did we kind of
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  breakthrough? Well, there's two parts I think
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  about one was, you know, what you guys had already was a
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  really fast iteration cycle where you were pushing out like
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  a breakneck speeds, you're pushing out weekly releases and
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  you had a pretty large beta audience.
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  So as far as understanding called the feature set and the
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  things that were resonating and you know, having already some
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  built in, this is still a little bit of early days of social, but
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  built in kind of audience for for trying to drive word of
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  mouth organically. That was all kind of there.
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  What we didn't have was I'd say kind of the, it was really
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  lacking fit and finish. You know, it looked like 1/2
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  engineering page, landing page that was holding up there.
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  The the logo is like clip art, but that's pretty normal.
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  The main thing was just trying to get that story polished.
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  Who are we, you know, what was the value prop?
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  Who, who are we really competing with?
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  I think in the end it wasn't so much other apps.
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  It was, it was the iPhones native app, the client that
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  shipped with it. That was really honestly like
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  the no decision decision for consumers.
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  It was sort of like, hey, it's on here, it works.
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  Oh, I didn't know e-mail could be so good on a mobile phone.
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  Oh, I'll just use this. But we had different
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  aspirations. And so we ended up, I think the
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  positioning was around, you know, it was like e-mail just
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  got a promotion and was do more, defer less because we were
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  speaking to a knowledge worker, a professional worker who we
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  felt didn't want to triage their e-mail.
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  They didn't want to just kind of, you know, swipe, swipe,
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  swipe and delete stuff until they could actually get to their
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  desk and get anything done. And what you guys had built, and
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  this is what the beta audience was showing us was you guys
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  could schedule things. You could always schedule really
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  effectively. You could share your schedule
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  with someone. You could do calendar, right,
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  calendar negotiation, you guys could attach files, all these
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  things and you were very you were totally interoperable.
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  So, so that was really a big deal.
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  And, you know, if you think about a professional at work,
• 9:52
  you know, going back-to-back to back meetings, you know, this
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  way they could get stuff done during the meetings, between
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  meetings in the hallway, whatever.
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  And that he wouldn't have like 10 hours of meetings and have to
• 10:01
  go home and do five hours of e-mail and then get their actual
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  work done. Yeah, I love the idea that like
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  we had a kind of crappy logo so we we up leveled it.
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  But you're really saying like we, we figured out what the
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  value was that we brought and then we connected that with our
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  audience and, and put together some messaging that would
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  resonate with them. So that, that, that hits home
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  for me as a, as a career marketer.
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  I I love that. And then you know, you've LED
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  marketing Peter from pre revenue to significant.
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  It's multiple times founders, you know, they struggle with
• 10:30
  knowing what to market when the product is still evolving.
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  How do you think about crafting the initial message or story
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  when things are are still so fluid?
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  So a lot of it again is that, you know, how do you sell or
• 10:42
  market when it's not fully baked and it's evolving.
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  And so again, it's that it's like kind of that North Star
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  vision you're going after and you're building that and it
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  doesn't happen all at once. It gets, there's a lot of
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  iteration, like if you make a set of assets, one of the things
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  I like about being early and doing a lot of things myself, as
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  I write the press release, I write the boilerplate for it.
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  I write the, you know, all the homepage copyright you, you do
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  the, you know, you help with a product deck and emails out the
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  cut. And you keep getting lots of
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  attempts to keep trying to explain it over and over.
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  And and things come out over time, like where where again,
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  you're extracting it more from the founders, like the the
• 11:18
  position, the story and the narrative exists.
• 11:20
  We I have to extract it more. The other thing I'll say, it
• 11:23
  happens to me a lot and I'm in an AI company now with
• 11:27
  professors and pH DS in AI and whole careers in it.
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  Similarly, at Accompli, you know, these guys, they were have
• 11:34
  been there done that team who still wanted to win.
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  And in particular, JJ and Kevin had built e-mail successfully
• 11:41
  across several platforms. And so, you know, starting back
• 11:45
  at open wave and so on and and then Zebra.
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  And so they've made e-mail first like as a client, then in the
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  cloud and now they're doing it mobile.
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  And so this team, this team had crazy domain experience and I
• 11:57
  did not. So, you know, my job is not to
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  really not to understand like the domain as deeply as they do,
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  but to think about somebody from the outside, a potential
• 12:06
  customer and how they might look at the value we're going to
• 12:08
  bring. So there is this translation I'm
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  doing and I not trying to become an expert at the same level
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  because I can't. And it's also not my job, but I
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  am extracting and shaping a story and I am and I am focused.
• 12:20
  It's like when you're driving, you're looking down the road,
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  not like down at your bumper. Yeah.
• 12:24
  I mean, founders also kind of feel this pressure to do
• 12:26
  everything. Do you remember back, like, or
• 12:29
  maybe even today when you're looking at your current company,
• 12:32
  what things you explicitly decided not to do?
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  And how do you kind of make that decision of like, you know,
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  there's content, social PR, paid ads, you know, there's just a
• 12:41
  bunch of ways. I think, you know, Peter, I
• 12:43
  think the one thing that I always remember just an
• 12:46
  incredible writer, right? And so I think you mentioned
• 12:47
  earlier like, hey, you, a lot of this is writing, right?
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  You're creating content, whether it's blogs, website copy, social
• 12:52
  copy, emails, etcetera. Like how do you kind of decide
• 12:56
  like what not to focus on when you're sort of looking at sort
• 12:59
  of crafting that some initial message and sort of deciding
• 13:01
  like what channels or where to get this out there?
• 13:03
  Yeah. You know, someone early in my
• 13:06
  career described marketing's assets and distribution.
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  So like, I think about the content, the writing, those are
• 13:12
  all assets and then you're mentioning like how you get it
• 13:15
  out there. I think about that as the
• 13:16
  distribution, the promotion. And I usually start with the
• 13:19
  assets and thinking about the comment for writing.
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  I, I talk a lot. And so writing is a way to clear
• 13:24
  my head honestly and shape things better and get it
• 13:27
  straight for myself and also show people to get feedback.
• 13:29
  And then there's an art of like writing.
• 13:31
  The website is not like anything you write.
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  It's like lots of little phrases and snippets and it's all kind
• 13:37
  of put together in this, you know, gestalt thing.
• 13:39
  And so it's a little bit of a weird, it's a little bit of a
• 13:41
  weird thing. But where I usually start is
• 13:44
  loosely, it's an audit, I guess it's informal.
• 13:48
  Normally it's like, does the company have enough of a brand
• 13:53
  look and feel that I can work with?
• 13:57
  And I've worked on some very expensive high end stuff like my
• 14:00
  consumer days at Electronic Arts and stuff.
• 14:02
  We spent unreal amounts of time and money developing brand
• 14:05
  assets. You know, start up.
• 14:07
  Yeah, at a start up it's like, you know, you just need to be
• 14:09
  good enough from really professional.
• 14:11
  It's really about credibility. Is this company going to be
• 14:13
  around in five years, especially if you're doing B to B stuff,
• 14:16
  that's what matters. So usually it's this audit of
• 14:19
  like, do we have a set of assets that kind of look like they work
• 14:24
  together. They don't have to reinforce
• 14:25
  each other and have, you know, all this positioning and
• 14:28
  messaging tree stuff. Like you can get very ornate
• 14:31
  with that. But at a startup, it's like
• 14:32
  directly that fits together. Then as far as getting out in
• 14:36
  the distribution of it, I kind of think about like it's a
• 14:39
  little bit of like what's working today and it's a little
• 14:42
  bit of like, what is the company a candidate for?
• 14:45
  And so like an example is a company I was at before accompli
• 14:50
  was called Flurry. They did mobile application
• 14:52
  analytics. So we would help.
• 14:54
  We had like 90%. We like own the market and we
• 14:57
  had as a result all this data about consumers, how they
• 15:00
  downloaded and used apps and retention rates across all these
• 15:03
  categories. So we told a lot of and our
• 15:05
  customer was a developer, app developer.
• 15:07
  So we told a lot of data stories that would help them with their
• 15:10
  business as far as like acquisition, engagement,
• 15:13
  retention, monetization and that's kind of where our
• 15:15
  products lined up. So so that company was a
• 15:17
  candidate for thought leadership based on data back stories.
• 15:20
  Our company, you know, obviously was not.
• 15:22
  We tried some blogging and some insights to try to build up, you
• 15:26
  know, a little bit of a following, but that was very
• 15:29
  hard. Social worked for us pretty well
• 15:31
  because we had a lot of influential people that you guys
• 15:35
  had built up in the beta in sort of back then.
• 15:37
  You know, like product hunt was still big.
• 15:40
  So we pushed on product Hunt because people were looking for
• 15:42
  buzzy consumer ish products. So, so then, you know, for a
• 15:46
  launch was like, let's do that. We've talked about in previous
• 15:48
  episodes this idea of building this network.
• 15:50
  So as a, as a kind of CMO across multiple businesses leading
• 15:54
  marketing growth, you've had to build this network of people
• 15:57
  that are really, really skilled that can go do this and tell
• 16:00
  interesting stories and across different channels in the right
• 16:03
  way. I want to, I want to double
• 16:04
  click on the idea of breaking through because I think when you
• 16:07
  talk about like a, you know, an Apple brand spot, that's what
• 16:09
  people think of as like, how do we think different, right?
• 16:11
  How do we show up in a different way?
• 16:13
  Is there like a signal or early pieces of feedback from
• 16:16
  customers that really helps you, especially in the zero to 1
• 16:20
  phases, Maybe it flurries or hacker one that fundamentally
• 16:23
  changed how you approach marketing or even product
• 16:26
  direction. And bonus points like flurry.
• 16:28
  I just want to call out 2014 acquired by Yahoo for a ton of
• 16:31
  money. Like, dude, you've you've got a
• 16:33
  great track record here. So I think for for founders
• 16:36
  listening like there's some Nuggets that I just want to make
• 16:38
  sure pay attention. Peter, Peter has seen some
• 16:41
  stuff, right. So what what do you what do you
• 16:43
  say to like customer gives you an insight that actually makes
• 16:46
  its way into the product or marketing strategy?
• 16:48
  That's interesting. I mean, look, I part of part of
• 16:51
  what first say is I can't pick well, if you've done investing
• 16:56
  or joined a bunch of startups, you know, like you kind of know
• 16:59
  you're especially with your own work, you're putting putting
• 17:02
  your egg in one basket for several years.
• 17:04
  So I do try to figure out if the team, the team has something
• 17:09
  right, like, you know, I think it's like, are they going at the
• 17:12
  most important things that are they going after the most
• 17:14
  interesting market they can and do they have something quote UN
• 17:18
  quote disruptive? I like disruptive stuff because
• 17:20
  I like to kind of tella here's how things are now.
• 17:23
  Here's how things are going to change like the Today, tomorrow
• 17:27
  story. So, so the caveat up front is I
• 17:29
  am looking for companies trying to take big swings who have
• 17:33
  great teams and you know, you don't always know.
• 17:35
  I've been at many startups 1 did not one was like not what I
• 17:38
  thought it was. And it was it was it was a mess.
• 17:41
  But such as a startup life. Your question, your question
• 17:44
  exactly, Jason, was what? It was basically like, how do
• 17:46
  you think about breaking through?
• 17:49
  The breakthrough. Yeah, taking, you know, signal,
• 17:52
  right, like customer signal, user signal in zero to 1 and in
• 17:57
  like pulling out an insight and saying, oh, you know what, this
• 17:59
  user is telling us something really interesting here.
• 18:01
  Let's apply that to the to the go to market, to the product
• 18:03
  strategy to how we're talking about this.
• 18:05
  If there's something jumps out we can, I'd love to hear.
• 18:07
  It. No, no, There's a lot.
• 18:09
  There's a lot. I guess I'm thinking about it
• 18:11
  because I guess the first thing is I'd say the biggest word, the
• 18:15
  biggest single word that I think is the most important word,
• 18:17
  which is also probably going to be a relief to people dealing
• 18:21
  with the question of will AI replace my job?
• 18:24
  AI won't replace your job, it'll change your job.
• 18:26
  But empathy is the word that's in my mind.
• 18:29
  So what I find, you know, I, Kevin, went to good schools, I
• 18:32
  went to good schools. You know, I, I have fancy
• 18:34
  degrees. I worked at big companies, But
• 18:36
  like a big difference between a good market and a good product
• 18:39
  person is an empathy. And so, and what I mean is like,
• 18:42
  can you put yourself in the shoes of that customer and like,
• 18:46
  what are their, what's their pain?
• 18:48
  What's their aspiration? You know, what are the dynamics
• 18:50
  like at work for them to make a decision?
• 18:53
  How easy are you making it for them to to try you and make a
• 18:56
  decision? So like that momentum piece is
• 18:58
  really, I think it comes from somehow understanding the
• 19:01
  customer really well. Signals come from lots of
• 19:04
  places. The best is if you can use the
• 19:06
  product yourself, honestly. But I work on a lot of stuff I
• 19:09
  can't use, you know, like if I went to cursor, how did that
• 19:12
  work for? Us like with accompli, right,
• 19:13
  like we had like, you know, we had this sort of product
• 19:16
  engineering sort of marketing loop and like I think the nice
• 19:19
  thing about emails, we did use the product, right.
• 19:21
  But like, you know, does that work today and you're in the
• 19:24
  company you're working at today. Like, are you the same kind of
• 19:26
  user that you were as an e-mail user?
• 19:27
  Well, we had a thesis at Accompli that, you know, people
• 19:31
  wanted to get things done and they wanted to, you know, Javier
• 19:35
  had a pretty clear story or distilled down into like, you
• 19:38
  know, find things easier, right, That kind of thing.
• 19:42
  You know, he had he had a list of a few things.
• 19:43
  So that thesis was pretty that was pretty well understood and
• 19:48
  we were building in that direction and we're getting
• 19:50
  positive feedback. In fact, I think you set up,
• 19:53
  Kevin, you were particularly good at feedback loops.
• 19:55
  I think we were using, we were using, we were getting lots of
• 19:58
  feedback from a lot of different places.
• 20:00
  How I do it today is we record all our calls, sales calls, and
• 20:04
  I listen to a lot of sales calls and I pull transcripts and run
• 20:06
  them through ChatGPT. And then I try to separate the
• 20:09
  garbage answers from the good answers and, and, and now I'm
• 20:13
  doing we have really good impact for our early set of customers
• 20:17
  meeting our stuff really works well.
• 20:18
  So now I'm. Doing interviews for case
• 20:21
  studies, success stories, and you know, I, that's actually
• 20:24
  quite different than a sales call where I walk them through,
• 20:29
  you know, I'm trying to extract a story from them, but it's
• 20:32
  really a very simple, a problem, solution, results kind of story.
• 20:35
  So it's like what we're using before, you know, what made you
• 20:39
  decide you needed to fix something?
• 20:40
  You know what, what did you look at?
• 20:42
  What did you choose? What was your first experience
• 20:43
  like with that? So I'm actually now getting the
• 20:45
  benefit of walking people through very carefully and
• 20:48
  understanding decision by the buying criteria, substitutes,
• 20:52
  alternatives, competition. Again, you know, we're in a
• 20:55
  world where people are just kind of doing it themselves.
• 20:58
  That's a lot of what we compete against is DIY versus like an
• 21:01
  actual established competitor. While the product is technical
• 21:04
  today, the one I work on, what we do is actually pretty
• 21:07
  straightforward from a value, but we answer questions, we
• 21:10
  answer technical questions that users have.
• 21:12
  That's kind of basically what. We do.
• 21:13
  I love that you're talking to customers and you're listening
• 21:16
  to sales calls. Every time I talk to a founder
• 21:18
  or a marketing leader or a product or engineering leader
• 21:21
  who doesn't do that, I'm like, this company's probably not
• 21:24
  going to make it right. And so it just makes my heart
• 21:27
  happy to hear to hear that and like it it, it bodes well for
• 21:30
  run LLM. You know, you're in this kind of
• 21:32
  noisy AI infra market. Can you walk us through the non
• 21:37
  scalable experiments, the channels, the messages, the
• 21:39
  community hacks that you kind of think about and have run in the,
• 21:43
  you know, the early days and and what did you decide?
• 21:46
  Like what was your approach and your framework for deciding on
• 21:48
  what, what would I double down on?
• 21:49
  What do I kill? What is that kind of North Star
• 21:52
  metric That's like, oh man, we. That's it.
• 21:54
  I'm looking for it now. I've gone through and reset the
• 21:57
  story and have a better version of the website and I'm doing it
• 22:01
  again in the background again because not there, it needs to
• 22:04
  be. And we are starting to try and
• 22:06
  we are driving some organic inbound lead.
• 22:08
  So it's AB2B company in the end. And we actually weren't sure.
• 22:11
  In fact, in the last several months, we were like, are we
• 22:13
  going to be more PLG and having high volume, like just have to
• 22:18
  really work on growth and conversion, you know, premium up
• 22:22
  sell or are we going to like get to the mid market sooner than we
• 22:25
  think, which is actually what's happening.
• 22:27
  There's compression. Bigger companies are willing to
• 22:29
  adopt AI faster than say they were SAS before this.
• 22:33
  I'm finding there's a compression in the market for
• 22:35
  demand for this kind of thing. So as far as figuring it out,
• 22:37
  like again, I kind of go back to I got some feel for the
• 22:42
  customer. Listen, some calls leaning
• 22:44
  heavily on the CEO who's, who's like a great guy, like can
• 22:49
  really explain things and you know, no ego and just, you know,
• 22:52
  we're trying to figure out the story.
• 22:53
  And then again, like what's working or what are we trying?
• 22:57
  Like I think today we're we, we announced the public beta and
• 23:01
  what we did there was not was not dissemble this like a couple
• 23:04
  months ago. And that was a good cycle for
• 23:06
  us. We basically did the friends and
• 23:08
  family outreach to everybody we knew to like.
• 23:11
  And unfortunately the company has a very good network of
• 23:14
  people who are deep in the space because they come from academia
• 23:17
  and they have a ton of like real Ballers who are actually doing
• 23:20
  this stuff. And so a lot of them, you know,
• 23:22
  we wrote like a very a series of blood.
• 23:25
  We had a whole launch week, but we wrote like what would be the
• 23:27
  equivalent of a really good press release pushed to our blog
• 23:30
  and pushed promoted on social. Social for us is mainly LinkedIn
• 23:35
  and and X to an extent, but X has been falling apart as well.
• 23:38
  So for us, it's really LinkedIn now.
• 23:40
  LinkedIn in the last 18 to 24 months has really become like
• 23:44
  the only platform, I think for B to B for for social, but it is
• 23:48
  extremely noisy. You mentioned that especially
• 23:50
  for AI stuff. So I think for us when I came
• 23:53
  into this company, because there's, there's sounded by two
• 23:56
  Cal professors and two PhDs that came out of Cal all with heavy
• 24:00
  like LLMAI, machine learning, computer science backgrounds,
• 24:04
  thought leadership came to mind, right?
• 24:06
  Is it this guys are a candidate for thought leadership?
• 24:09
  And The thing is founders role at this stage, like is it, you
• 24:11
  know, are they the main Blogger? Are they the main salesperson PR
• 24:15
  person? Like how do they focus like
• 24:17
  their time? Because I'm sure it's limited in
• 24:18
  terms of how much they can spend with marketing versus product or
• 24:21
  other things. That's right, That's right.
• 24:22
  And this is this all works dovetails in because I can
• 24:25
  handle kind of both. I know I'm going on a longer
• 24:28
  answer here, but the CEO, the other thing they were candidate
• 24:30
  for is founder marketing because the CEO and the professor were
• 24:34
  right. One of the professors guy named
• 24:35
  Joey, Joey and Vikram is our CEO.
• 24:37
  So Vikram and Joey have been writing for over a year like a
• 24:40
  sub stack weekly blog. They call the AI frontier.
• 24:44
  And it's actually a mass. It's separate to our company,
• 24:46
  but it's a mass, a pretty good following.
• 24:48
  And it's where they just talk about where the state of AI is.
• 24:51
  And you know, have we reached to AGI or some concept, right?
• 24:55
  So they're just thinking very big and in a cerebral way.
• 24:58
  And so that exists already. And so I knew.
• 25:01
  So one thing I have to feel out like Javier at was ACEO at
• 25:05
  Accompli and he was great in front of people.
• 25:07
  And the CEO at hacker one was was more shy and the CTO is more
• 25:12
  shy, but they had a lot of the CTO take that credibility with
• 25:15
  customers and analyst here. The CEO is, is a really good
• 25:19
  balance. His role I would say is he's
• 25:21
  product leader and he's founder selling still.
• 25:23
  He's at the end of founder selling.
• 25:25
  He's we have our first kind of Rep and then I'm pitching in a
• 25:28
  little. I'm trying not to pull myself
• 25:29
  too out of position, but I'm also selling a little and and
• 25:33
  then, you know, he has an engineering background, of
• 25:36
  course, but someone else is running engineering and he is
• 25:39
  pretty good about like not doing more than he he should, but he's
• 25:42
  doing everything kind of when I joined, it was like, again, I
• 25:46
  like accompli actually was I think I was the only person
• 25:49
  without ACS degree who wasn't building, who wasn't a maker.
• 25:52
  So so you know I. That makes it so that you have
• 25:54
  like this unique perspective, though, which is great, right?
• 25:57
  Like, I think you you end up coming in and you're you're the
• 25:59
  guy who should be looked to as the expert in marketing.
• 26:01
  I'd never tell Kevin how to write code or at this point,
• 26:04
  tell Devin AI how to write code. But you know, I think it's
• 26:07
  similarly like, you know, it's easy for marketers to get sucked
• 26:10
  into this trap of, you know, well, everybody's a consumer.
• 26:13
  So everybody thinks they know marketing and it's, you know,
• 26:15
  being able to establish now here are the frameworks.
• 26:17
  Here's the approach. Here's how we do this.
• 26:18
  We're going to do thought leadership and this is how you
• 26:19
  do thought leadership, right? This is how we're going to
• 26:21
  leverage our CEO and our founder.
• 26:23
  And so I want to talk about this thing that you that you've kind
• 26:26
  of talked about on your profile and you mentioned LinkedIn and
• 26:28
  like tell me about creative destruction.
• 26:30
  What is that? What does that mean to you?
• 26:32
  Like give me the pithy, like if I'm a founder and I'm thinking
• 26:35
  about my first kind of marketing, go to market, what is
• 26:38
  how, how could I leverage Peter's creative destruction?
• 26:41
  Yeah, I think it's a play on. I mean, it's a, it's a concept
• 26:44
  that now I'm blanking on who came up with it and properly
• 26:48
  attribute it. But creative, creative
• 26:50
  destruction is the idea that sorry, what am I saying on my
• 26:53
  LinkedIn? Because I think I I might have
• 26:55
  tweaked that. Yeah.
• 26:56
  It's crave destruction. It is crave destruction.
• 26:57
  Crave destruction is the original term.
• 26:59
  Sorry, I had to, Yeah. It's it's, there's a German word
• 27:01
  that I can't pronounce and it's an economic concept, right, that
• 27:04
  describes. The process.
• 27:05
  Where you innovations replace and make obsolete older
• 27:08
  innovations. But I think it applies to
• 27:10
  marketing, which is I'm guessing where you're taking this.
• 27:12
  Yeah, and I think it's because I work on, it's the types of
• 27:16
  things I choose to work on. And I think I also am putting it
• 27:20
  up there because because there is a like like to challenge the
• 27:24
  status quo. There's sort of an there's sort
• 27:27
  of an irreverence or defiance I have built in as part of my
• 27:30
  personality that I try to kind of hide because, you know, like
• 27:33
  it doesn't always work in corporate culture.
• 27:35
  And I just come out of five years at Yahoo where, you know,
• 27:39
  by DNA design, whatever the innovation in entrepreneurship
• 27:43
  is not there anymore. It's like been it gets beaten
• 27:45
  down pretty hard if you try. So I think for me it was that
• 27:49
  idea of getting back to what I really love to do.
• 27:52
  It's just like, I love nothing more than to to take a run at a
• 27:55
  major incumbent and knock them off.
• 27:57
  Like I just like the David versus Goliath story.
• 27:59
  And I like, I like the idea. Well, and I like the idea.
• 28:03
  And I think when I find Kevin has this people, I work like
• 28:07
  there is a, there is a I'm going to bet on myself.
• 28:10
  Yeah. I'm not intimidated by you and
• 28:13
  your big company. In fact, you're, you're slow.
• 28:16
  You're slow because of it. You have all this legacy
• 28:18
  inertia. You can't get out of your own
• 28:20
  way. And I'm going to, I'm going to
• 28:21
  cut you apart. Just watch.
• 28:23
  And I love that idea because it's so the creative destruction
• 28:26
  to me is like, it's maybe it's a kung fuish type thing, but the
• 28:29
  energy is already there. Things are being replaced.
• 28:32
  There are cycles of replacement happening all the time.
• 28:34
  And incumbents were resisted, of course, because they're trying
• 28:36
  to push out their revenue and profit curves.
• 28:39
  But, you know, there are there. I, I like it when something new
• 28:43
  comes along that can make things better.
• 28:46
  And it sort of can't be denied, but there's going to be
• 28:48
  resistance against it for a while just because that's the
• 28:50
  way it works. And I like to be the one who
• 28:52
  helps. It helps push it through.
• 28:54
  So that's a great place to leave it because that's like, that's
• 28:58
  it. You know, you're, you're, you're
• 29:00
  David and you're going to, you're going to make the next
• 29:03
  thing happen. I love it.
• 29:05
  And the tools, the tools, I will say real quick, the tools, this
• 29:09
  is going to help hopefully with an answer.
• 29:11
  Before that you might, I don't know if you want to edit this
• 29:13
  around, but when I start with a small company, a lot of it's
• 29:15
  about managing the budget. So I'm always organic inbound.
• 29:19
  So thought leadership, SEO content, those are always the
• 29:22
  place to start. If you have thought leadership,
• 29:24
  you can accelerate that. Paid media is not going to work
• 29:26
  well initially anyway, as you guys know, the way the auction
• 29:29
  works and Kevin's actually quite an expert in this.
• 29:32
  So, so you can't go into paid media because it's going to be
• 29:35
  inefficient and bleed you out. So you have to build up your
• 29:38
  brand, your story, your base, your following.
• 29:40
  You got to do it with inbound out of the work.
• 29:42
  You got to be good at that anyway, because that's kind of
• 29:44
  what's available to you and what can work and also build a
• 29:46
  foundation for the future. I love it.
• 29:48
  Peter, where can folks find you and learn more about your work?
• 29:50
  Yeah, I think LinkedIn is an easy place to find me and I try
• 29:54
  to keep everything up to date. And you can.
• 29:57
  That's just Peter Farrago there. And then, you know, I'm on all
• 30:01
  the socials. You can also, you know, I'm
• 30:03
  promoting a lot of what we're doing in and around AI at my
• 30:05
  company. You'll find that you know
• 30:07
  through my LinkedIn. It's run LLM.
• 30:10
  That's an easy place. To start, awesome brother.
• 30:12
  Thanks for coming out and good to see you.
• 30:14
  And well, that was Peter Fargo breaking down marketing zero to
• 30:17
  1. I mean, huge thanks to Peter for
• 30:18
  sharing all the tips and practical insights.
• 30:20
  And you know, quite frankly, some more stories from Flurry
• 30:22
  and Accompli and you know now what he's doing with Run LLM.
• 30:25
  You know, I think hopefully that gives you a clearer picture of,
• 30:27
  you know, where to focus your energy in these, you know, kind
• 30:29
  of early days. Like what did you think, Jason?
• 30:31
  Yeah, you know, this one is a near and dear to my heart as a
• 30:35
  as a career marketing and growth guy.
• 30:37
  You know, know your audience, start with a clear understanding
• 30:40
  of who they are and your value for them, your value
• 30:43
  proposition. There's nothing more important
• 30:45
  than that. Next is iterating quickly on the
• 30:47
  brand on messaging, whether you start with the clip art logo or
• 30:50
  not, get to the right message for that audience and, and get
• 30:53
  there quickly. In doing so, you probably will
• 30:57
  use customer feedback loop. So you know, understanding the
• 31:00
  customer and then using that to improve the product and the
• 31:03
  storytelling. Peter's listening to sales calls
• 31:05
  that matters, right? He understands the customer
• 31:07
  deeply. And then focus on organic
• 31:10
  inbound and thought leadership before paid.
• 31:12
  This is especially relevant in in a situation like Peter's
• 31:15
  where you're doing B to B marketing.
• 31:16
  You have larger customers and longer sales cycles.
• 31:18
  And so you you want to make sure that you've got a system that
• 31:21
  works before you spend a bunch of money on ads.
• 31:23
  So that that for me was the big stuff.
• 31:25
  I jumped out. I hope you found it useful.
• 31:27
  If you liked the episode, please give us a like and subscribe.
• 31:29
  Share it with the founder that's wrestling with their initial
• 31:31
  marketing strategy. And we'll be back next time with
• 31:33
  another deep dive into this founder journey.
• 31:35
  Awesome. Thanks again for listening to
• 31:37
  Founder Mode. Remember, in the beginning it's
• 31:38
  not about complex funnels, it's about finding those first
• 31:41
  believers.