How to build a cost-effective growth marketing strategy with Daniel Lohrmann from ikaros

Oct 14, 2021

The term growth marketing gets thrown around a lot these days, but what exactly is it and how can it help YOUR small business grow in a cost effective way? Find the answer out and more in this episode of Forward Thinking.

After starting out as an investment banker in London, Daniel quickly figured that he didn’t want to be just another cog in the machine. Always having had an analytical streak, the convergence of marketing, analytics, product and many more disciplines into “growth” turned out to make growth marketing the perfect fit for him.

Having worked as Head of Growth and Data Insights at Sellable, a Sydney prop-tech start-up, Daniel decided it was time to start out himself and build ikaros, a now-established boutique growth marketing and analytics consultancy leveraging data to deliver high-performance growth strategies for scale-ups and SMEs.

Daniel Lohrmann and his team at ikaros
Daniel Lohrmann his and team at ikaros

What you will learn in this episode:

  • Two factors that analytics helps with for any early stage business
  • Going beyond knowing the customer’s first name for marketing personalisation
  • How to use pirate metrics and acquisition elements to map out your customer journey
  • Applying cohort analysis to your business
  • How to start collecting data in a realm of “data-geddon”
  • How to monitor the right KPIs
  • Daniel’s documenting and process behind growth experiments
  • Why doing things that don’t scale is important
  • How Daniel drastically improved a direct marketing campaign
  • How to monitor the effectiveness of offline marketing strategies
  • Picking the right marketing channel
  • Prioritising your ideas
  • The “7 friends in ten days” framework
  • At the end of the episode, Daniel’s weekly challenge for your growth team.

Notable quotes:

  • You need to distinguish between really low impact experiments and the impacts that have the chance to revolutionise your business
  • You want to define KPIs that are painful for you to look at
  • Every experiment that you run, you’re going to get 10 more ideas, and you’re going to get 10 more questions that you want to execute as well.
  • You need to invest your time into proving that your idea works first
  • I would rather invest five times 20% and then get 400% output than investing one times 100% and getting 100% output

Resources mentioned:

Reading Recommendations:

What business would you build on Mars?

I’m thinking about luxury items. Think about plant-based items…If you’re taking seeds for example, it’s like very little mass that you need to take to Mars, which obviously, mass is really valuable for you. If you can,  successfully grow something even if it’s just in your bank or so on Mars and sell that maybe back on earth, that’s going to be like a novelty,  really unique, luxury item. So it’s obviously going to command a massive markup.

Reach Daniel here:

on Linkedin

Transcript (or download the pdf here)

Daren (00:05):

The term growth marketing gets thrown around a lot these days, but what exactly is it and how can it help your business grow in a cost effective way? Find that answer out and more on this episode of Forward Thinking. Hey everyone, I’m Daren Lake the Audio Content Manager here at Metigy. Welcome to Forward Thinking, a podcast by Metigy. In this series, we speak with inspirational business owners, brands, and marketing experts to learn from their experiences on the frontline and uncover what it takes to build a world-class business.

Daren (00:41):

After starting out as an investment banker in London, Daniel Lohrmann quickly figured out that he didn’t want to be just another cog in the machine. Always having had an analytical streak, the convergence of marketing, analytics, product, and many more disciplines into growth turned out to make growth marketing the perfect fit for him. Having worked as head of growth and data insights at Sellable, a Sydney PropTech startup, Daniel decided it was time to start out himself and build Ikaros. And now established boutique growth, marketing and analytics consultancy, leveraging data to deliver high performance growth strategies for scale-ups and SMEs. A few things you’ll learn in this episode, how to monitor the right KPIs, that’s key performance indicators. Why doing things that don’t scale is important, how to start collecting data in a realm of data getting. Daniel’s, documenting process behind growth experiments, and much more. Let’s get into the episode with Daniel and Metigy’s head of content, Brendan.

Brendan (01:35):

Daniel, welcome to the show.

Daniel (01:37):

Thank you. Great to be here.

Brendan (01:39):

You have a very diverse background. You’ve worked across many areas in marketing, so I’m super excited to dive into many areas today, but first of all, I just wanted to hear the story of how you originally got involved in marketing.

Daniel (01:51):

Yeah, absolutely. So funnily enough, I kind of started out in investment banking, but didn’t really kind of like those working hours too much. So after two years decided to move on, get my master’s degree. And that’s where I kind of got my first exposure to marketing startups, et cetera, by working for a German kind of startup builder, incubator, et cetera, called Rocket Internet. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them.

Brendan (02:15):

Yeah. I’ve had some guests on from the Australian Rocket Internet.

Daniel (02:19):

Awesome. And that was kind of really my first exposure to marketing growth, et cetera. And obviously coming from a banking background, I always had a little bit of an analytical streak. So kind of that whole convergence of like growth product analytics, et cetera, really fit my whole approach very well and kind of my interests very well as well.

Brendan (02:43):

So I mean, speaking of analytics, that’s an area that early businesses often struggle with in the early days. There’s so much that you have to do. They often overlook that altogether. So why analytics is so important for early stage businesses?

Daniel (02:56):

Yeah. Couple of points, obviously one, surprisingly many businesses that I work with don’t actually know which are their most effective and efficient channels, right? So you’re talking to businesses and suddenly you’re asking questions like, okay, so cohorts from which channel most people can tell you what the acquisition costs are for certain users or conversion events, but not many businesses then can look further down the funnel and say, well, if I look at the users that I say acquire from Facebook and compare these to a cohort from say Google Ads, I’m not able to say, how do these convert further down the funnel, can I monetize these users? Do these users churn very quickly, more quickly, et cetera.

Daniel (03:39):

So you always want to have like a view on the complete customer journey while they’re using your product. So that’s kind of one thing that I think analytics is really, really important for. And the second thing is, goes more into kind of the data aspect in general, rather than analytics is personalization is critically important. I think nowadays, because you can’t just cut through kind of all that marketing noise anymore with campaigns that are either unpersonalized whether that’s your targeting or whether that’s kind of referencing personalization elements, like my name, et cetera, and name is not enough anymore. So everyone knows your name. So it’s not enough to just know that, but you need to understand preferences. You need to understand how kind of that user is using your product, which kind of USP is appealing to them, et cetera.

Daniel (04:28):

So I recently came across in a really interesting campaign from Deutsche Bahn, which is the high-speed rail network or general rail network operator in Germany. And what they were doing is they were doing kind of a multi-channel campaign and effectively generating ads personalized for you based on kind of your travel searches. So you were searching for, let’s say traveling to China, somewhere, Guilin looking at kind of the mountains, et cetera. And they would then try to find regional destinations in Germany that had similar features similar pictures. Then they would show you kind of what the flight to that destination would cost. Let’s say 1,900 euros more, or you can take the Bahn and pay 19 euros to a comparable destination in Germany, which I think is just a fascinating use of personalization because this is hyper relevant for you and it gets you to stop, right? Because we always want to get people to kind of stop scrolling, for example, through that newsfeed and like, hmm, this looks interesting. Let me find out more.

Brendan (05:30):

So, I mean, you mentioned personalization and first name isn’t enough anymore. So after that, I mean, where do people go? Do we have to work on our customer journey? Map out the different points where we want to insert that personalization? What are the next steps?

Daniel (05:44):

Yeah, absolutely. I assume you’re very familiar with pirate metrics, the toll kind of our metrics framework, which I’m personally a huge fan of. So obviously you start with the acquisition elements, so you already need to personalize on an acquisition level. The thing is you don’t have that much information about your potential user at that point, but the one most important and most critical element there I think is really personalizing based on your customer personas because not every customer that you’re trying to acquire is going to be receptive to the same message. So you really need to understand what’s the pain point that you’re solving and how does that fit together with your USP for this specific persona? Not in general for this specific persona. Now, many businesses try to do too many things at once. And so you have let’s say one learning page for 10 different personas. Just send everyone there rather than trying to differentiate your messaging for those different personas.

Brendan (06:40):

Interesting and you touched on cohort analysis before. What’s the easiest way to do that in the early days?

Daniel (06:47):

So couple of good tools for that personally, if you’re a little bit more technical and technically advanced, I’m a massive fan of segment. I don’t know if you’ve worked with these guys before, but I think the platform is just incredible. It’s basically your Google tag manager on steroids, it’s a little bit of effort to kind of get it implemented in the first place, but once you have it implemented, then kind of adding additional integration, whether that’s your Google analytics on top of that is really, really easy. And one tool that I find absolutely fascinating is Heap. I don’t know if you’ve worked with these guys before, but they effectively work either on its own doing something like auto-tagging. So they track everything that happens. And then you can later on define which of these events are actually meaningful for you to analyze, including looking at certain cohorts based on channel, based on user behavior, et cetera, and then looking at your metrics further down the funnel, how these differ based on these cohorts.

Brendan (07:43):

That’s interesting. And I know you’re a data guy as well. So have you heard of the term datageddon? So there’s so much data. I mean, 90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years. There’s so much data for business owners to analyze, where do we start? I mean, we’ve got autonomous cars coming, for example, you’ve got IoT devices, so much data that’s becoming available. Where do we even begin?

Daniel (08:09):

Yeah, that’s a really, really good question. And I hadn’t heard the term before, but I’ve definitely seen it happen that you have so much information that you don’t really know where to start. And I think there’s two things for this. Number one is every time you’re running a report or analysis, you need to be really clear and understand what’s the question that you’re actually trying to answer because I see a lot of reports just being run for the sake of running reports. So it’s we need a dashboard so let’s set up a dashboard and we have 50 KPIs on there, but they don’t really tell us anything about the business. So that’s kind of the one thing. I have a specific question that you’re trying to answer with your report. And then the other thing is that you should really sit down and try and understand, again, coming back kind of the pirate metrics, our acquisition activation, retention, referral, and revenue, understand for each of those levels what’s kind of the one core KPI that is telling you about the health of your business?

Daniel (09:08):

And limit it to that one KPI, don’t overdo it. Don’t look at too many KPIs, but limit it purposefully to KPIs that are telling you where it’s painful. You don’t want to look at vanity KPIs that are always going up now. So for example, let’s say you’re looking at new user registrations or cumulative new user registrations. That number is always going to go up no matter what you do, but it’s not going to tell you anything about the health of your business. You want to define KPIs that are painful for you to look at, then you can kind of set up your reports to kind of answer those questions or give you those numbers.

Brendan (09:47):

Yeah. Interesting. And I know from reading a bit about your profile and getting to know you that you like to think outside the box. So I mean, a lot of people say this, but you’ve actually got a lot of documentation and process behind it.

Daniel (10:01):

Yeah, definitely. So I think there is kind of, that is really the crux of this whole kind of growth process or growth marketing process that you set up a process that supports you experimentation, trying crazy ideas at little cost or as little effort as possible. So when we’re talking about growth hacking or growth marketing, we’re not talking about kind of these million dollar campaigns that take kind of year to prepare really high production values, like kind of your super bowl commercials, et cetera. But we’re talking about really kind of scrappy experiments and one experiment that I recently ran for the startup that I used to work for Sellable. I was head of growth and data insights there. And we were looking at out of home because it’s a prop tech startup. So inherently it’s very kind of location specific. And so we’re like thinking about how we could leverage out of home with that kind of location specific element.

Daniel (10:55):

And at the same time target our customer personas. And what we found is obviously out of home is really expensive if you want to put up billboards, some ads on the bus, et cetera. If you get one to get reach, you have to pay a lot of money. And at the same time, it’s really hard to have good call to action on these type of ads, because how long are you looking at the billboard that you’re driving past, walking past and how likely is it that you’re going to take action immediately after seeing that billboard? So what we came up with as an experiment was let’s actually try ads in restrooms. You may have seen them, kind of these A3 size ads in pub restrooms, shopping malls, more usually they are kind of health oriented or kind of government oriented ads.

Daniel (11:39):

So the one thing that we were thinking about is how do we fit a prop tech startup into kind of that environment, which is obviously a little challenging. How we solve that was, okay, let’s just try something that’s a little bit cheeky. So for example, what we said is on the edge, this is a porta-potty in Sydney, it’s costing $200,000. Do you want to know how much your port-a-potty is worth? Just text your address to this number. So what did that do for us? One kind of fit that environment from the messaging, but it gave us this kind of direct kind of call to action. Because if you think about it, you’re in the restroom, what’s the one device that you definitely have with you? Your phone, most likely you’re even on it. So we’re thinking about that. And then how do we leverage that?

Daniel (12:28):

So let’s get people to send us a text message, old school. I know, but everyone can send a text message. Not everyone may have Facebook messenger, WhatsApp, et cetera. And that gave us kind of two core elements. One, we got a qualified lead out of it because for lead to be qualified, we needed their address so that we could run our checks on it. A, does it fit our criteria? And B we needed the phone number of the lead so that we could give them a call and kind of chat to them. So by having them send us a text message, we really drove kind of those qualified leads. Now and the interesting thing about that is that we could send them an kind of follow up texts, again nothing of this really very novel ideas. Evaluation tools, REA has them. And we use kind of Twilio for our kind of text messaging API.

Daniel (13:16):

And we use Google maps to kind of identify where that address was located. So we just kind of combined existing tools into a new channel. Didn’t take us a whole lot of time, maybe a day to set this up, then setting up the campaign, outsource the design got that done for I don’t know, $200 or so, and then put up the campaign. In total the ad at cost was really, really cheap for these out-of-home ads. I think if I recall correctly, maybe $60 or so a panel. So again, you don’t need a lot of money to kind of test out these ideas. And the results were really, really interesting because we were advertising in different locations for example, shopping malls versus pubs, RSL clubs, lawn bowling clubs, et cetera. And interestingly, even though we had a lot more potential visitors in the shopping malls, impressions than in the pubs, the absolute number of conversions in both were about the same.

Brendan (14:08):

Right. That’s interesting.

Daniel (14:10):

Yeah. Really, really interesting. And then we were obviously trying to dig into that data and try to identify why this was the case and what we found out as well one of our hypothesis was that probably in a shopping mall, you’re more stressed out now. So you have an objective that you’re trying to get to. You don’t have time to look at any ads, whereas in the pub you’re kind of more relaxed. You may actually see the ad multiple times. Yeah. If you’re there for a bit and you don’t really have anything to do or a clear objective in mind, so you’re more open to actually trying it out.

Daniel (14:40):

And then at the same time, when we actually dug into the kind of time stems of when we received the messages, what we found out is that we got one message and then like five later we got two, three, four, five. So we had this little viral effect there going offline that someone saw the ad, tried it out, thought it was funny, went back to their mates and they were trying it out at the table together. Let’s see what numbers I get. So that was something that was really, really interesting for us. And then also informed kind of obviously future experiments that we would have run.

Brendan (15:15):

Interesting. So we’ve mentioned a lot of tools today, already Heap, analytics, segment. What other tools are in your arsenal at the moment?

Daniel (15:23):

So talking about personalization, for example, I think one of the core tools for very easily driving personalization is actually another Australian startup. They are pretty big now Autopilot. I’m sure you’ve heard of these guys. Yeah, really, really user-friendly interface for driving personalized email outreach, SMS, even set up your Facebook audiences, et cetera, through their tool. And if you’re a little bit more technical, something that I can recommend as well as a similar tool called Viro. And because that gives you a little bit more technical control over the elements, but is a bit more complex to implement.

Brendan (16:02):

Interesting. And all the resources that Daniel has mentioned, you guys can find at metigy.com/podcast. So the next thing I wanted to talk about things that don’t scale. So I know this is something that you advocate for as well. And there’s many examples as well, some big ones from the US. I’ve heard stories about the Stripe founder, Patrick Collison in the early days, going from person to person installing Stripe on developer’s computers. I mean, there’s Etsy as well, who started off at offline markets before they built their marketplace. So why is doing things that don’t scale so important?

Daniel (16:42):

I think it’s really about trying to avoid work as much as possible, right? Because we’re all very, very time poor. So we really need to think about where do we want to focus? And if you decide this is something that I would like to test out and experiment with, it doesn’t make sense to kind of try and get to 100%. I mean, thinking about that 80-20 rule, I personally would, for example, rather invest five times 20% and then get 400% output than investing one times 100% and getting 100% output, right. So that’s kind of one thing to it kind of leveraging your time more effectively. And by talking about things that don’t scale, what I mean is really, you need to invest your time into proving that your idea works first, right? So invest those 20% into proving out that idea rather than just assuming it’s going to work and then investing your resources into building a crazy automated system.

Daniel (17:41):

So for example, at Sellable, I was also experimenting a lot with direct mail. Our first direct mail campaign was a complete failure. I had this amazing envelope designed with kind of how to tear off the edges. So it kind of looked like you were receiving a pin or whatever, but complete flop, didn’t get any conversions out of that. Spent a lot of money on kind of getting that printed, mailing it out through Al’s posts, et cetera, and nothing happened. We’re like, well, that sucks. Let’s kind of shelf direct mail for a second, but then we kind of kept coming back to that because again, a property is a really, really local business, right? So they’re the one thing that, you know, for a property is obviously the address. Yeah. So I want to be able to kind of convert people based on their address.

Daniel (18:29):

So we tried direct mail again, and this time what we did differently. And from that very first campaign was one we significantly improved our targeting. Again, something that I was talking about earlier that very first campaign was basically we mailed the entire suburb, just mailed the entire suburb. And obviously only a very tiny percentage of people are actually in the market, for selling or buying a new property, et cetera. So for the second campaign, we really kind of pinpointed the targeting a lot better. And then what we did in order to test that campaign, and we didn’t want to go through that process of having to design anything fancy and printing it, mailing it out, et cetera. So what we did instead is we just wrote a normal letter now kind of CEO to sign it.

Daniel (19:15):

And then while it was about 1,000 letters, our intern had to fold 1,000 letters, put them in into envelopes and then put 1,000 stamps on them because we just bought stamps at the post office and put them on the letters, put them into the mailbox and done. That was our experiment. And then obviously the one thing that you may ask yourself now is, how did we measure response rate, right? Because it’s really hard for many offline channels to actually measure whether you’re successful or not.

Daniel (19:43):

And that’s kind of core part of that whole experimentation process. Because if I don’t know if it’s working, I don’t know if it’s working. So given that we mailed certain addresses, we could then tell on our website, if we had people coming in and putting that same address into our funnel. So that was effectively the way that we matched up, letters that we send out to that address, did someone come onto the website and put an address that matches that one into the funnel and that new kind of campaign, even though it was not designed at all, it was just text, just like a normal letter that you would get from someone, a single letter worked a lot better.

Daniel (20:23):

We got significantly more conversions, well, significantly more conversions than zero for the other campaign of course, but we got a significant number of conversions out of it. So that kind of for us then validated that original hypothesis that if we can just target more precisely, direct mail can work for us.

Brendan (20:41):

Yeah, no, it’s interesting that you’ve mentioned things that don’t scale. You’ve mentioned a lot of channels, direct mail, telemarketing, SMS, a lot of channels that businesses starting today may overlook, but they may not realize the conversion rates and the open rates are still a lot higher than digital. So how do you sort of sell that to people now in your consulting business that maybe they don’t want to try these channels that have traditionally worked better? They might just want to go straight to Facebook ads for example.

Daniel (21:11):

I think that’s what really, that whole growth process is about. Also, I’m not specifically advising businesses oh you should definitely do direct mail or you should definitely do Facebook ads or you should definitely do. It always depends on your specific circumstances. Now, for example, let’s say you are kind of marketing successfully on Snapchat, and now you hear of this new app TikTok, that’s come around and it’s all the rates right now. And you’re like, hmm. I wonder whether this could be a suitable channel for me to acquire customers as well. But what you need to do is you just need to test it out. And that’s where all these things that we were talking about. Come together. Just try it out with a small budget, take like $100, take two, three hours of your time put together a really crappy campaign.

Daniel (21:56):

Yeah. And I mean, crappy. Yeah. Do it in PowerPoint if you have to, but just test it out and check if you can achieve, let’s say similar conversion rates, similar acquisition costs than you achieve on Snapchat. And if you can, you’ve just validated that this is a potential channel. And then you can think about more, how do I now optimize this? How do I leverage this at scale, et cetera. So it’s really about that process of okay, how do I structure my experiments? How do I come up with new ideas? And also very important, how do I prioritize? Because as you go through this process, every experiment that you run, you’re going to get 10 more ideas and you’re going to get 10 more questions that you want to execute as well. But you need to distinguish between really kind of low impact experiments and the impacts that have kind of the chance to revolutionize your business.

Daniel (22:46):

And what do I mean by that low impact? Is for me something like, let’s change the button color on our website from blue to orange. Yeah. Unless you are the iconic or whatever. You’re not going to have enough traffic for that to really make a big impact on your business. So you will want to focus your time and effort on the things that we just talked about. Trying to identify completely new audiences, new channel, new messaging approaches that you can use to drive, for example, customers to your site, rather than just trying to like adjust a tiny little thing.

Brendan (23:20):

Yeah. That’s interesting. And you touched on creativity and early stage business owners. A lot of these guys have a ton of ideas that they want to try out. So how do you personally keep track of your ideas and some kind of ideation phase, do you put them all in a table and what kind of framework do you use to decide which ideas to do first?

Daniel (23:41):

Yeah, absolutely. So what I like to apply for, I mean, that whole growth process that we’ve talked about is basically applying the lean startup principle to marketing, right? It’s a little bit of a no brainer, but you just actually need to do it build, measure, learn. You have a marketing hypothesis, you need to try it out again, little resource investment from time and money perspective. Then you need to measure your results and see whether your hypothesis was validated or not. And if you’re starting out, that can be as easy as putting that in a Excel sheet, just have an Excel sheet with all your hypotheses or ideas that you want to test out. What I usually like to do is I like to separate the hypothesis from kind of your rationale. So my hypothesis could be something like TikToK is going to be a great channel for us, or I’m going to be able to use TikToK, to acquire customers at a reasonable customer acquisition cost.

Daniel (24:36):

Then your rationale for that, you’re understanding why this is the case it’s kind of separate from your hypothesis is, well, Snapchat is already working well for us. It’s a kind of a similar audience in these two channels. So I think that new channel is going to work very well. But by separating these two elements, you’re then at the end of the test more easily able to determine whether or not your hypothesis was actually correct. So just put that in an Excel sheet and then use a framework called ICE, which you may have heard about before. It’s basically about impact confidence and effort. No. So how much impact we’re already talking about, does this idea have on your business? And again, this is just a ballpark number on a scale of one to 10, just a ballpark number, no fancy calculations needed. Same thing for confidence.

Daniel (25:23):

How confident are you that you’re right? Yeah. You think like this is a sure thing or is this something like, I think we should try it out, but I’m not really sure if it’s going to work and then effort, how much effort is it going to take you to test this idea? On the one hand, but also how much effort is it going to take you to in the end implement this idea? Because your implementation may look very different from your test. Your test can be manual and low effort at that.

Daniel (25:53):

But then if you need to invest two weeks into building out that process in order to actually scale it up, then it may not be as valuable for you to test in the first place. And then leverage that to kind of prioritize all your ideas and document your results as well. Because think about it, you’re running a test now, and then six months down the road, you have got a new employee joining and they get that same idea. Well, if you already have that test and database, you can always say, well, we tested this and this were our results. So let’s look at these other things rather than maybe testing the same thing again.

Brendan (26:27):

That’s exactly how we do it here at Metigy as well. And I might put our template in the show notes. If anyone’s interested, it’s got a few formulas, it’s got the ICE framework and a few nice emojis as well.

Daniel (26:41):

Emojis are always great.

Brendan (26:42):

That’s right. It’s got the rocket ship taking off.

Daniel (26:44):

Nice.

Brendan (26:45):

So I’ll put that in the show notes that you guys can find at metigy.com/podcast. So Daniel wanted to thank you so much for all the value that you’ve given the audience so far. I’ve still got a bit of time left. So I wanted to ask you a couple more questions. So one of the questions was, can you tell us more about seven friends in 10 days? What does this mean?

Daniel (27:06):

Well, seven friends in 10 days is one of the kind of core growth KPIs that all our favorite social network has come up with or did come up with in its early days. And what’s behind that really I mean, it’s not my story, but what’s really behind that is that I think it really showcases the importance of kind of a robust analytics infrastructure, because obviously to come up with a metric like that, we need to understand what is driving for example, retention, which was their core metric. And they were looking at all kind of the different correlations with user retention. Yeah. What’s driving user retention. And in the end they found that seven friends in 10 days, if you make seven friends within your first 10 days of the platform, you’re effectively becoming a user for life and identifying that was critical for them because this is a really easy to understand kind of metric.

Daniel (27:59):

Yeah, because suddenly you can communicate this across the team. You can communicate this to sales if you have customer success, operations, product engineering, marketing, et cetera, and everyone understands what it means. And you can think about how do you build out, let’s say product features to drive this metric forward? Let’s say, I allow you to upload my contact book. I implement friends’ suggestions, I auto connect to your Gmail and load all your email addresses, whatever. So that is kind of the one thing that is really important, actually identifying, and then breaking down your kind of growth KPIs into something that’s easily digestible and easily understandable by everyone in the team.

Brendan (28:42):

Excellent. And what has you most fired up around marketing in 2019?

Daniel (28:47):

Really that whole topic of growth and growth analytics. I think there is like so many tools out there and so many platforms and best practices, et cetera. But I think it’s really, really hard for small businesses and even startups or scale ups to kind of stay on top of all these best practices and then even implement all of this. Yeah. Because sometimes we’re talking about this datageddon in the beginning, you also have this whole information geddon because the whole marketing landscape or the whole industry landscape is just changing so quickly. I’m learning something new every day. Every day. I’m learning about new tools. I’m learning about new processes, frameworks, ideas, concepts. So I think it’s really important to really stay informed, but then also to get kind of some guidance around what do I need to do now? What’s kind of my next steps? What’s kind of the most important, highest priority things on my agenda? And yeah, I think that’s really an exciting problem to solve.

Brendan (29:44):

Awesome and you mentioned learning something new every day. Are you a big reader? Are there any books that you can recommend to the audience?

Daniel (29:50):

Yeah, so I’m a big reader, but books, I mostly read fiction, just kind of, for me a book is something that I take to kind of like relax on the couch a little bit, but for information I’m really more following blogs and newsletters, et cetera, which I’m sure Metigy has as well.

Brendan (30:09):

We haven’t used that up, yeah.

Daniel (30:10):

Exactly. So kind of that’s where I get most of my information from these kinds of podcasts, newsletters, blog posts, et cetera, because books, as I saying, the landscape is changing so quickly, until you print or publish a book, it’s taking you too long, then it’s probably outdated already. Plus any idea that you put in book format, 100,000 other marketers are already doing, so it may lose effectiveness. So one blog that I regularly follow is Andrew Chen, just amazing kind of write-ups on growth topics, for example.

Brendan (30:42):

Yeah. Really good. We’ll put Andrew’s link in the show notes is at Andreessen Horowitz now. And I think he was ex head of growth at Uber.

Daniel (30:51):

Yeah exactly.

Brendan (30:51):

Yeah. A lot of good lessons from Andrew. So Daniel, a lot of information today, the show notes are going to be very long, but-

Daniel (31:01):

I hope that’s a good thing.

Brendan (31:02):

Very valuable and very long. So definitely looking forward to getting all of these resources up on the website. So we do like to ask one final question before we leave. Are you ready for launch?

Daniel (31:16):

Definitely.

Brendan (31:17):

Because you’re on the first flight to Mars with Elon Musk and the first settlers aboard the SpaceX star ship rocket. So what business do you start when you land on Mars and how would you market it to the new Martians?

Daniel (31:30):

Really interesting question. First off, I think my fiance is not going to be very happy that I’m on that rocket ship because she’s already told me she’s not going.

Brendan (31:36):

She’s not going?

Daniel (31:38):

She is not going. I have already told her if it’s possible, I want to be there. But she said, that’s not for her. But yeah coming back to your question. So my first idea here is really, what’s something that’s valuable for the settlers, of course, but then I don’t really have any skills. I’m not an engineer. I can’t really build anything. Yeah. So it’s kind of really, really hard for me, or it was really hard for me to kind of come up with something here. And what I’m thinking now is think about luxury items. Think about plant-based items. Why am I thinking about that? If you’re taking seeds, for example, it’s very little mass that you need to take to Mars, which obviously mass is really, really valuable for you.

Daniel (32:20):

And if you can successfully grow something even if it’s just in your whatever bank or so on Mars and sell that maybe back on earth, that’s going to be a novelty, really unique luxury item, et cetera. So it’s obviously going to command a massive markup. So that’s how I was approaching that whole topic I’m thinking about, for example that all-

Brendan (32:45):

A very interesting answer. And again, Daniel, thank you so much for coming in today. Is there anything that you’d like people to do before we go and how can they get in touch?

Daniel (32:56):

I think there’s definitely one thing that I’d like everyone that’s listening today to do is set up kind of a weekly growth meeting, 30 minutes where you’re ideating, where you’re thinking about what are experiments that we can run. Then also prioritizing just thinking about, okay, what’s going to really have the biggest impact at the lowest cost to our business? Just stick to that 30 minutes every week, ideation and prioritization, and then decide which tests you’re going to implement in the next week. And then think about the results that you have achieved in the past week.

Brendan (33:27):

Very solid advice. Daniel, thank you again so much for coming on. All of Daniel’s show notes, which are going to be long and valuable can be found at metigy.com/podcast. Daniel, it’s been fun.

Daniel (33:40):

Thank you, Brendan.

Daren (33:44):

From Metigy, you’ve just listened to Forward Thinking again. I’m Daren and Metigy hopes we helped you find more insights and tips into your business. To find out more about Metigy and get a listener exclusive three month free trial, visit us at metigy.com/podcast. And while you’re there, go and check out some more episodes. If you liked what you heard, please share a link to another business owner or marketer who you think could get something from this. Also, to help us out it would be great if you left a five star review on your favorite podcast app Blast. Never missed another episode by following or subscribing to us on your favorite podcast player. See you on the next episode.

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