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This is my story of moving from Bento, to Customer.io to Drip. And the fiasco that dropped our open rates to less than 1% from something like 60%. READ FOR THE DRAMA OF IT ALL Complex ESP Landscape The landscape of email tools is complex. There are generally three types of email tools: For developers (e.g., Postmark) For email marketing (e.g., Mailchimp) For lifecycle marketing (e.g., Iterable) When I started my career in marketing, I was only familiar with tools like Mailchimp. In recent years, I've realized the importance of lifecycle email tools. These integrate deeply with your data warehouse or Customer Data Platform (CDP) to sync data seamlessly. Or atleast promise to. Simpler DTC email marketing tools like Drip or Klaviyo may not require such extensive data synchronization. What are lifecycle emails? Lifecycle emails are more complex. It can bring in custom data from your data warehouse. Look at this email from Figma. It consolidates data points from my account and sends me a recurring message every week. Loom does this end of year review based on my data. This is what I wanted to achieve! My starting point: Bento I had moved to Bento after they offered us a really good pricing. Once I was past the honeymoon period with the tool, I couldn't use it anymore. There were bugs, complex UX that forced me to step into Discord every time I had to send a single email. Sometimes, sensitive info was shared publicly. There were some good things too (eg, batch sending) that helps. Streamline's a PLG company which means we do get a lot of sign ups. And not all these sign ups should stay in our email list forever. For the longest time, I had asked the team to let me clean my list. But they didn't offer a feature to do so. So, I was stuck emailing users that weren't engaged. This was counterintuitive to everything I had learned in marketing so we wanted to move. My next phase: evaluation and customer.io I evaluated three tools in this category: Iterable $$$ Braze $$$$ CIO $$ All seemed to solve the problem and offered a bi-directional connection with Mixpanel, the tech stack we use for analytics. I chose CIO because it was the only one offering a free trial. I didn't want to commit to a relationship without a test drive. Others also forced us into an annual contract plus a compulsory onboarding fee. In theory, it all seemed good. Except, it fell short when it came to the actual implementation. Firstly, Mixpanel can only do cohort syncs every 30 minutes for a maximum of 1,000 users. If we get more than 1000 users in a single hour, it would break. Second, Mixpanel can take time to merge profiles and data. Sending them immediately means that we sent profiles to CIO without any emails. And CIO wasn't smart enough to exclude users without an email. It kept trying to send an email... That hurt our deliverability. Integration was also not quick. It took forever to complete and was buggy. I wouldn't blame CIO for the majority of this though. However, CIO was also quite difficult to use. I could deactivate users but it wasn't code-less. I had to hire an agency and have them create a webhook to clean up users. Stripe's integration wasn't a 1-click unlike what I was used to everywhere else. Every single Stripe event was supposed to be connected manually with code. I really wanted to get CIO to work. It's used by Notion, Mixpanel and a lot of good companies. Unfortunately, it turned out too complex for me. And it's likely that Braze and Iterable are probably much harder. I still want to use these tools someday, but that day is not today. The drop to 1% To make things worse, we were hit by a spam attack around the same time. This dropped our domain reputation from Good to Bad in Postmaster by Google. We installed NeverBounce on our site to prevent spam sign ups. Or atleast, that's what we thought! Since we isolate our sub-domains for email marketing, the spam rates were originating from our root domain. Which we use only for verification emails. Upon careful investigation, it turned out that one of our devs was testing lots of emails with fake emails in production every single day that caused this drop. And even after we added NeverBounce, they were able to bypass it by testing it on their local machine. All these fake users were being sent two emails that ruined our deliverability. NeverBounce proved very useful and our deliverability rate is climbing back up to 30%. I hoping to get it on it's way back up within a few weeks. Moving to Drip Integrating Drip was done in less than 1 week. Everything just works. It's smooth as butter. And while it's far more expensive than what Customer[dot]io, Braze, Iterables of the world would've cost us, it makes it up for ease of use. It also has something as basic as A/B testing which Bento lacked.. so I'm happy to have it back. Plus, pruning lists was brain-friendly. Something Bento stopped us from doing and CIO added a lot of friction. Whitelisting and dev-handoff was clear as day. They do lack some features but I like that they build slowly without taking shortcuts. They don't try to ship a lot and end up breaking things. The biggest difference I've found is that the email builder is custom-built. Whereas most others use Stripo (a 3rd party tool they embed in). Stripo has bugs that ESPs have no control over. Drip also has a more brain-friendly way to upload new subscribers should you want to. While CIO and Bento have you format the CSV it in a certain way, Drip lets you handle everything on their site. It saves hours but more importantly, it's the art of details that matter to me. Lessons My portfolio may seem like all roses and sunshine, but that's not the whole picture. There are successes and many failures. So, I'm going to document some of my learnings in my blog. Brian Balfour mentioned in a podcast somewhere that he maintains a bulleted list of the lessons. So that when he looks back, he has a long list of learnings he'd never forget. Over the past few years, I've used tools like Drip, Mailchimp, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, Sendgrid, Postmark, Customer[dot]io, CampaignMonitor, and Bento. I've also reviewed Iterable, Braze, and Clevertap, among others. I've realized that I need software that is not buggy, overly difficult to set up, bound by an annual contract, poorly designed, or disliked by its own team. It should not be built by an overly ambitious team that fails to execute well. This might be a lot to ask, however, that's my lesson. I want to pay a higher price for a well-built product than buy software that's mediocre. I also want software that doesn't change their UI far too many times. I don't want to log into the software only to discover everything's changed yet again. I'm also going to take Reforge's Martech course next to get better at this stuff. Disclaimer: These are my personal emails. Every ESP tool has their fans, and it works for their core ICP. I wasn't one but you might be. So, please do your research and don't let my negative experience dissuade you from ruling out a tool but rather let it inform you where to investigate. Best, Khushi

If I told you that... Watermarks don't have to be visual That they could still be added to users who've paid you money in order to... remove watermarks. Or that they could even be added to your enterprise customers in a very sales-led org Then, you'd probably call me a liar... Well, watermarks don't need to have a singular edge case. They don't have to look like a brand vomit, making your product impossible to use in production. There are more ways than one that benefit free users too. Let's look at some examples. 1. Streamline uses suffix in the name When users download free icons/illustrations from Streamline, a suffix is added to the icon name. The suffix is a combination of the brand name (Streamline) and the icon family (Ultimate). It also shows up when users copy/paste the code: Alert Bell Notification 2 Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com

There are three ways to work with me. Below are the listed consulting projects I can help with. Status: I'm currently booked out for a few of them. For those, I keep a waitlist and would be happy to add you. Brainstorm Workshop together on specific problems. Usually ranges for a few hours together. Brainstorms are free but subject to availability. Audit Audit your existing flows, mine insights, and create a growth strategy. These are intense deep dives with starting recommendations. Testimonials sound like, "wow, we would've paid a lot more money for this". Build Hands-on execution help for individual projects. The devil is usually in the details and Build ensures higher chances of success. Please reach out to know more about the projects I can help with, work samples, and availability. P.S  I know I need to put this in a proper page on the site vs a blog — will do that soonish.

Hi, I'm Khushi! And this is how I use Reforge AI for work. Warming up the AI leads to better results If you wish to ask questions like: "What are the types of monetization strategies a company like Streamline can use?" Try asking something like this first: "What are some monetization challenges Streamline could face?" If your goal is to find solutions, have Reforge AI align on problems first. Ask for tactical advice to move beyond the strategy AI can end up being too strategic at times. You might want to probe it for more tactical tips. "Streamline already offers a generous free tier. How can I prevent it from cannibalizing sales for the premium product? List some ideas and pros and cons of each. If you can pull examples from Reforge's curriculum or the live case study videos, that'd be great!" Another prompt that I use at times, is this: "Can you give me some tactical ideas of what I can try and test out? Less strategy. More actionable inspiration." Other prompts ideas Every prompt must go through a warmup period. Otherwise, the responses are too strategic and obvious. For OKRs "I'm tasked to write OKRs to own the marketing and PLG department for a sales-led business......some more back and forth..... What should they be?" For Benchmarks: I prefer to use benchmarks from Reforge vs use Google. "What are the benchmarks for conversion rate for an ungated product with a free trial and a free product?" "What factors influence conversion rates most?" For Roadmap Planning: "What are some projects growth engineers on my team should work on next? I'm trying to build our roadmap? Please share some ideas for projects." "Great, write more." Dealing with strange results If Reforge doesn't have relevant content for that topic, then it isn't very helpful. For stuff you can google, I find it helpful to use ChatGPT/Claude more than Reforge. Generic questions I asked lead to average responses. What is buyer journey mapping and why is it important? What are some questions to ask during a buyer journey process? Full coverage content For content that Reforge has in its curriculum, the replies are very thorough. You'll start seeing the result of it in your questions. I find talking about adjacent topics helpful. Example 1: How to design cancellation flows? How to analyze cancellation metrics? Are there any metrics for cancellation flows? List the metrics and the formulas. Example 2: "I have an infrequent product where users set it once and forget about it while it continues to offer ROI in the background. What are some challenges products like this can face?" "How can I add more frequent use cases for a product like Churnkey? Churnkey is a retention automation platform for high-volume subscription businesses. On average our customers retain 20-to-40% of subscription revenue they would have otherwise lost to churn. It reduce voluntary customer cancellations as well as involuntary churn due to credit card processing failures." Results Client 1: "We’ve been very impressed with what you accomplished in just one month!" -> Offer extended Made an 80 slide long PLG deck, which was in depth with zero fluff. And extremely tailored to their use case. Client 2: "You've really nailed our product" Client 3: Is pretty happy too! Got a promotion! .. and so on! Final thoughts Previously, I left jobs to take up the courses. Whatever Reforge said, it took me 10x longer to apply. I had anxiety and fomo for not being able to complete as many courses as I wanted to. I honestly like the feature to bridge gaps. I would bother the EIRs and email them for help. Now I don’t do that, thank god. Thanks, Khushi

Hey there, I wanted to share my experience with a pair of headphones from a company called Sennheiser. As someone who isn't too tech-savvy, I was looking for headphones that were comfortable, durable, and easy to use. Unfortunately, the product I received turned out to be defective, with a battery that drained quickly and ultimately died in the middle of an important call despite showing 70% battery life. I purchased the headphones on Amazon, but their customer service was less than helpful. They directed me to contact Sennheiser's customer support, which proved to be a frustrating and time-consuming process. Overall, I would not recommend purchasing from Sennheiser and suggest looking for alternatives that will provide quick and efficient resolutions to any issues. Key Takeaways Sennheiser headphones were uncomfortable and had a defective battery. Amazon's customer service was unhelpful in resolving the issue. It is recommended to look for alternative headphone options that prioritize quick and efficient resolutions to any issues. Personal Background I'm Khushi and I want to share my experience with the Sennheiser headphones. I'm not a tech expert and I don't invest too much time in researching technology. I need headphones that are comfortable, durable, and work well. I don't want to keep purchasing headphones every two or three years, so I want them to last. When I first tried the Sennheiser headphones, I found that they were not comfortable at the top and hurt my head. However, I still used them because I only have 1-2 hour calls per week. The biggest problem I faced was the battery drainage. The product turned out to be defective after Sennheiser was bought out by Sonovo, and the quality dropped. I bought the headphones on Amazon, and they said that I could not return them but could get a replacement. I placed the order and received it within a few days. However, the battery died in the middle of a call even though it was at 70%, and I had to use different headphones and mic. I contacted Amazon, and they told me to contact Sennheiser's customer support. I called Sennheiser first, but the number Amazon gave me did not work. I found another number online, and they made me go through a long process to create a report. The only solution they offered was to courier the product to Delhi, which would take 10 days to evaluate and investigate. I filled out the form live on the call, but I still haven't received any follow-up email from them. I wasted 5,000 rupees on this, and I'm not going to courier it to Delhi. I have important calls to attend, and I don't have the time or energy to spend 10 hours figuring out the problem. The support was not helpful, and I'm appalled that they can do nothing. They're not even refusing me service, but they're making me go through all sorts of nonsense. I wouldn't recommend Sennheiser because of the poor support and defective product. My Headphone Requirements As someone who's not a tech expert, I need headphones that are comfortable, durable, and work well. I don't want to have to keep purchasing new headphones every few years. Based on my experience with the Sennheiser headphones, I have the following requirements for my headphones: Comfortable padding that doesn't hurt my head Long battery life that doesn't drain quickly or randomly shut off Quick and efficient customer service that can resolve any issues Clear return and replacement policies that are easy to understand and follow I would not recommend the Sennheiser headphones due to their defective battery and poor customer service. Instead, I suggest purchasing headphones from a local electronic store with good customer service and clear return policies. Initial Impressions: Sennheiser Headphones Review HD350BT As someone who is not a tech expert, I was looking for headphones that were comfortable, durable, and worked well. Unfortunately, these headphones did not meet my expectations. The first issue I noticed was that the headphones were not comfortable at the top and caused discomfort after a short period of use. However, I was willing to overlook this issue since I only needed them for a few hours of calls per week. The major problem with these headphones was the battery drainage. The product turned out to be defective and it died in the middle of a call even though the battery was at 70%. I reached out to Amazon for assistance, but they were unable to help me and directed me to Sennheiser's customer support. After contacting Sennheiser, I was informed that I had to courier the product to Delhi, which would take 10 days to evaluate and investigate. I was required to fill out a form and take multiple printouts, which was a hassle. Additionally, I did not receive any follow-up email from them even after hours of waiting. I would not recommend purchasing Sennheiser headphones due to their poor customer support and defective product. It was a waste of time and money, and I regret my decision to buy them. Sennheiser Headphones Review: Battery Issue The product turned out to be defective, and I believe it is due to the company being bought out by Sonovo, which resulted in a drop in quality. The battery drainage has been a significant problem for me. During a call, the battery was at 70%, but it suddenly turned off and displayed a message saying "turning off power up power zero." I had to switch to different headphones and a mic, which was quite inconvenient. I tried charging the headphones overnight, but the battery remained at 70%, which means there is a battery problem. I reached out to Amazon within their 7-day period, but they were not able to help me much. They suggested that I contact Sennheiser's customer support, which was not very helpful either. They asked me to courier the product to Delhi, which would take 10 days for them to evaluate and investigate. I had to fill out a form live on the call, but I still have not received any follow-up email from them. I do not have the time or resources to spend 5 hours and money to courier the product to Delhi. The support from Sennheiser and Amazon has been disappointing, and I would not recommend buying this product. If you are in Mumbai, the service center might be helpful, but for the rest of India, it is not worth the hassle. In addition to the battery issue, the headphone pads turned out to be much smaller than expected, which was not a significant concern for me. However, the defective battery is a significant problem that needs to be resolved quickly and efficiently. Sennheiser’s Customer Service Experience When I reached out to Amazon for assistance well within the 7-day period, they directed me to contact Sennheiser's customer support. However, the process of reporting the issue and arranging for a replacement was lengthy and frustrating. Sennheiser's Mumbai branch had me fill out multiple forms and take printouts of the problem and invoice, and then instructed me to courier the product to Delhi for investigation. After spending hours on the phone and preparing the package, I still hadn't received a follow-up email from Sennheiser and decided not to send the product for evaluation. Instead, I reached out to Amazon again, but they were unable to provide any further assistance and suggested I continue working with Sennheiser's customer support. Overall, my experience with Sennheiser's customer service was disappointing and time-consuming. I would not recommend purchasing their products, especially if you live outside of Mumbai or Delhi. In the future, I plan to buy from local electronic stores where I can easily contact them for support and assistance. Resolution Process at Sennheiser The product turned out to be defective, and the battery drainage was particularly frustrating. I reached out to Amazon for help, but they were not able to do much beyond directing me to Sennheiser's customer support. When I contacted Sennheiser's Mumbai branch, they made me go through a lengthy process of creating a report and filling out a form live on the call. They ultimately told me that the only solution was to courier the defective product to their Delhi branch, which would take 10 days to evaluate and investigate. However, I have important calls to attend and cannot afford to wait 10 days for a resolution. Additionally, the number Amazon provided me was incorrect, and I wasted time and money trying to get in touch with Sennheiser's customer support. In the end, I would not recommend purchasing Sennheiser headphones, especially if you are outside of Mumbai. Amazon's "replacement-only service center" policy was not helpful in my case, and I was left frustrated and out of pocket. If you do purchase electronic products, it may be better to buy from a local store where you can speak directly with the seller and have a better chance of resolving any issues. Sennheiser’s Product Comfort and Design As someone who values comfort and durability in headphones, I was excited to try out the Sennheiser headphones. Unfortunately, my experience with this product was less than satisfactory. Firstly, the headphones were not comfortable at the top and caused discomfort and pain after extended use. Additionally, the ear pads were much smaller than expected, which made them uncomfortable to wear for long periods. In terms of design, the product turned out to be defective, with battery drainage being a major problem. Despite being at 70% battery during a call, the headphones suddenly turned off, causing a lot of inconvenience. When I reached out to Amazon for assistance, they were unable to provide any help beyond suggesting that I contact Sennheiser's customer support. However, contacting Sennheiser's customer support proved to be a frustrating and time-consuming experience. The number provided by Amazon did not work, and the process of creating a report and packaging the product for courier to their Delhi branch was lengthy and inconvenient. Overall, I would not recommend purchasing these headphones due to their lack of comfort and the poor customer support experience. It is much better to buy from a local electronic store with better customer service. Recommendation Based on my personal experience with the Sennheiser headphones, I cannot recommend them. While I appreciate the need for durable and comfortable headphones, these headphones have several issues that make them a poor choice. Firstly, the battery drainage is a major problem. The defective product that I received died in the middle of a call despite having 70% battery remaining. This is unacceptable and caused me a lot of inconvenience. Furthermore, the customer support from Sennheiser and Amazon was not helpful. Amazon only provided me with the option to contact Sennheiser's customer support, which proved to be a lengthy and frustrating process. Sennheiser's Mumbai branch asked me to courier the product to Delhi for evaluation, which would take 10 days. This is not a quick resolution and is not efficient, especially for someone who has important calls to attend. In terms of comfort, the earpads are much smaller than expected and caused discomfort. This is a minor issue compared to the battery drainage and poor customer support. Overall, I recommend avoiding Sennheiser headphones. There are better options available from local electronic stores, where customer support is more likely to be helpful. As for online purchases, I recommend checking the return policies and customer support options before making a purchase. Amazon's Role and Policies I recently purchased a defective headphone from Sennheiser on Amazon. When I reached out to Amazon for help, they informed me that the only thing they could do was direct me to Sennheiser's customer support. This was frustrating as I expected Amazon to take responsibility for the product they sold me. Furthermore, the replacement policy on Amazon's website was not clear. It was only after I purchased the product that I found out I would have to email and fill out forms to get a replacement. This was a waste of my time and money. In addition, Amazon's return policies are becoming more restrictive, making it harder for customers to return products that do not meet their expectations. This is unacceptable, especially for tech products that may have issues. Overall, I would recommend being cautious when purchasing tech products from Amazon. It is better to buy from a local electronic store that you can easily contact if there are any issues. Amazon's policies and lack of customer support make it a less reliable option for purchasing tech products. Final Thoughts After my experience with the Sennheiser headphones, I cannot recommend them to anyone. I need headphones that are durable, comfortable, and have a long battery life. Unfortunately, the Sennheiser headphones failed on all three counts. As far as my Sennheiser headphones review goes, it is not worth it! The battery drainage was a significant issue, and the product turned out to be defective. When I contacted Amazon for help, they were not able to provide a solution, and I had to contact Sennheiser's customer support. The process was frustrating, time-consuming, and ultimately, it was not resolved. In terms of comfort, the earpads were much smaller than I expected, and they hurt my head after a short period of use. While this may not be a problem for everyone, it was a significant issue for me. Overall, I would advise against purchasing Sennheiser headphones. The customer support is lacking, and the product quality is not up to par. Instead, I would recommend looking for headphones at a local electronics store where you can receive more personalized support.

Earlier, I thought calculating bounce rate in Mixpanel wasn't possible. Even their blog states that it's not possible to calculate bounce rates. But then, I think there's a way to calculate bounce rates in Mixpanel. Look at this template report they prepared for me. As you can see, I'm able to search for landing pages, exit rate, and bounce rate. All of which I previously thought wasn't possible to calculate in Mixpanel. How to calculate bounce rate in Mixpanel There are two ways. Simplest way is to modify a Mixpanel template. Another way is to just create it from scratch, which is more scalable. In this example, I'll show how to use a template. Then, towards the end, I'll show how you can create it on your own too. 1. Create a board Go to the boards and create a new one. It's under Discover. Choose "Use a Template" 2. Pick a template Choose this Web Analytics Template. It has the bounce rate metric pre-calculated for you. 3. Answer two questions To correctly answer them, think about whether you're a large site or a smaller one. Smaller sites: I use Pageviews for the first one and then Page Title for the second dropdown for my small personal site. Larger sites: If you have a separate web app and a marketing site, you might need to create a custom pageview event which is a sum of both of those. So I'd either use a combined metric for both of those pageviews or only isolate the marketing site. For Page Name, I'll probably use URL path / Current URL instead of Page Title because you can keep changing the Page Titles without losing historical data. 3. Click open this report Navigate to "How are each of the website pages performing?" report. Then click on the title so that it opens it up in a new page. 4. Customize metrics On the left sidebar, customize the metrics. Let's take a look at each of the individually B) Landing Page: Notice that the way they're calculating is by using "First Touch". That's a smart hack! C) Exit Page This is last touch, pretty clever! It'd be good not to forget this. D) Bounces This calculates total bounced sessions and they've set up a formula which gives you more granular controls over GA4 on how to define a bounce. I changed this from 2 to 1 because for some of our pages, just spending more than 10 seconds is fine. But you could customize this however you want.. Their default recommendation is 2. They've also hidden this metric and used a custom metric to show bounce rate. 5. Lastly, calculate the bounce rate Mixpanel calculates bounce rate like this: Total Bounced Sessions / Exits * 100 I'm not sure it's accurate though. I would calculate it something like this: Bounce rate in Mixpanel = Total Bounced Sessions / Total Sessions * 100 And ChatGPT agrees! Mixpanel's calculation of bounce rate will lead to an inflated rate because they're essentially taking a smaller denominator than what I am. It might make sense for some use cases so I'll leave it up to you to decide. First check with their pre-built formula. Then use mine by replacing the C with the A. This is the web standard and should always be right. Bounce Rate = D/A*100 You should see an improvement of 10-15% on each page. Last touches / thoughts I'm happy that I tried out Mixpanel's templates. I was just playing around with their tool on the weekend trying stuff on my personal site and accidently found this. Their templates are a really good starting point and showed me how to calculate the metrics. However, it's might not always be right, so just double check each part of the equation. In the future, you don't have to go to the templates to create formula. Your formula remains the same and is reusable across other reports. Mixpanel Bounce rate = Sessions, where total pageviews is 1 AND time spent is less than 10 seconds / Total Sessions * 100 Remember, that to be able to set 'first touch' or 'last touch' at the top in the events, you will have to first break down. Select "Attributed by" and then "Page Title" Best, Khushi

Zombie users are paying subscribers who pay you but don't use your product. They get counted as active subscribers, when in reality they should be considered as churned subscribers. How to measure zombie users in your product? Step 1 - Identify your engagement metrics This could be anything like pageviews, sending a newsletter (eg: Mailchimp), creating a draft (Jasper), sending a message (Slack), or creating a board (Mixpanel). Step 2 - Create a filtered view of your users I like to keep my annual and monthly subscribers separated but you can cluster them together. Here's a rough idea of how that could look like. Then sort the report by value. Customizing your subscription health 1. Using % trends You can add an event with all active subscribers. Then use a formula to find the percentage of healthy active users or zombie users (eg: zombies / total subscribers%) 2. Segmenting further You can also create three groups: healthy, at-risk, and zombie. So, you can try to win-back at-risk users. This is important to do because Zombie users might come back later and request for a refund. They might also not be happy with the brand. What should you do about zombie users? I really like what Slack does with Zombie users. As soon as they track that a user has not been active in the past 30 days, they don't bill the workspace owner. Why exactly is Slack doing and isn't doing? 1. Always charge for 1 user even if the user becomes inactive. This is probably because Slack has a cost to serve in terms of data storage costs for the workspace. 2. Don't refund the charge but instead add a credit They aren't refunding for the month. Instead, they're saving a little bit of cashflow plus ensuring that the customer's bank statements remain clean. I don't like using a lot of payment apps like Google Pay because they offer cashbacks. Cashbacks ruin my account statements. Why is this a good billing strategy for zombie users? People often hesitate to start a subscription because they're worried they will forget to cancel it. This pricing decision reduces friction to conversion. It's also good for brand and word of mouth. Clearly, I'm writing about them :) And it's also good for the customer. They aren't shocked or feel like an idiot when they see their statements and realize they forgot to cancel. But I acknowledge that this pricing decision can come from a place of privilege. Some companies can't do it if they need the cash. One of the companies I worked for signed an annual contract with Sendbird (a messaging service). Now, development time took longer but Sendbird wouldn't extend or cancel the contract. This was a tiny startup paying thousands of dollars for a service they weren't using. We wrote to them a few times but they just stopped responding. In a world of Sendbirds, be a Slack :) Thanks for reading! Khushi

// This post has strong opinions that are loosely held. I also acknowledge that I'm taking inspiration from other industries which might not be accurate. But it's a starting point to solve an industry-wide problem we face. I'm open to feedback and suggestions. Everyone knows that marketing and growth teams are the first to be laid off. These teams have the shortest tenure in tech. Often times, they get fired because of one of these reasons: "The company has to pivot." "We have a retention problem." "Marketing can't acquire customers." "Growth can't grow revenue anymore." Not all layoffs are bad. Some are valid but there's a reason why marketers/growth people have the shortest tenures compared to other departments like product management, engineering, and customer success. I was inspired to find a solution and asked a few questions to myself: Are growth/marketers fluffy? Can they really not sell? Are they all words and no results? And assuming all of that is true, then Why is this the case? And what can we do about it? This investigation led me to explore whether the problem lies elsewhere? First, please walk with me through some examples. Then, I'll stitch everything together and share a hypothesis. #1 Intuit's most successful vs. a total failure ad Intuit is one of the most successful SaaS companies in the world with a valuation of $180 billion. Their earliest product was an accounting software. Campaign #1 To run a direct advertising campaign in PC Magazine, Intuit had to bet its entire net worth of $125,000. If it failed, the company would be bankrupt again (they had almost gone under twice before, and at one point, they had to stop paying employees' salaries). The founders wrote this direct response ad themselves after consulting with a marketing friend. Take a look at their old ad copy from 1986: The result? Huge success. The copy was drafted by Intuit's co-founder who had previously worked at Procter & Gamble. If you've got a few extra minutes, watch the interview below starting at the 33:42 mark. Campaign #2 Eventually, Intuit hired a marketing agency. This agency created a two-page ad featuring a bald lady who had seemingly pulled out all her hair doing accounting. Do you think it would perform well? Source: In$ide Intuit Book The ad was expensive to produce, with all the agency fees. Worse yet, it brought in a grand total of 4 (four!) customers of the millions of people that saw it. Yikes. No wonder the founders were upset. I think tech is relatively easy to sell. There's a clear value-exchange and risks are offset by a subscription business. "I think SaaS is beautiful because it's a pure value exchange between customer and company. And as long as the customer is receiving what they think is enough value, they'll continue to pay for your product. So it creates this really great incentivization structure for businesses to solve real problems." — Dave Burson, Head of Product, Growth & Monetisation at Canva Intuit built one of the best products. They became the market leader in 2 months. They had done lots of market research. If you watch the interview above, you'll see they mention 'research' in almost every 3rd sentence. Founder was ex-P&G and that marketing background is incredible. But who is to blame for the failed Intuit ad? The agency, the company, or just the process? To answer that question, let's take a step back and see if companies outside of tech have solved this problem. Life's not so easy in other industries. #2 FMGC companies approach differently At bigger companies like Unilever or P&G, Marketing == Product team. Marketing decides what to build, for whom to build, why to build it, how much to price it, and how to sell it. Sure, sometimes we end up with products that are over-optimized for marketing. Look at any supermarket aisle. But the products sell. They aren't built by one team and then simply handed off to the marketing team to "sell." Revenue and product accountability lies with one team. It's why PMs at Airbnb are accountable for revenue. In tech, product marketing often ends up with the task of "hey, we've built this, now let's get customers." This approach doesn't effectively address demand. #3 Baskin Robbin's 31% Discount Consider another example: Baskin Robbins, the ice cream company, has maintained a consistent message since its founding in 1947. Their logo has always featured the number 31. This number wasn't arbitrarily chosen; it signifies the "31 flavors" concept, offering a different flavor for each day of the month. If a user is well-retained, Baskin Robbins asks them to deepen usage by ordering more of the same flavor (get a tub at a 31% discount). The 31% discount is a clever trigger moment and a time-lapsed deal which, once expired, would require users to wait for about 60 more days. It associates Baskin Robbins with the 31st of each month. Upon closer inspection, Baskin Robbins has effectively implemented: Usage and Frequency Mapping: Something typically managed by Growth teams today. Trigger Effects: Leveraging the 31st of each month. Product: Introducing a new flavor to attract a new niche. Activation: Encouraging the trial of multiple flavors. You might think this entire strategy [read case study] was conceived by someone at Baskin Robbins. However, the idea for "31" actually came from the Carson-Roberts advertising agency (which later became Ogilvy & Mather), in 1953. So, the difference is clear And it makes sense why. Marketers don't understand the possibilities that tech can build. That's why in tech we have product managers. People with the ability to do market research and communicate to devs. So, you have sales, marketing, and growth teams all working on leads. The product team is good at identifying a pain point and making the best possible product in the world. But then, product managers might not have revenue accountability. If it doesn't sell well, the short-term solution is always to market more. Here are some examples of what is written in my college marketing book by Philip Kotler: Growth is essential for the success of any firm. Thus, to be a long-term market leader is the goal of any marketer. Marketers can try to increase the amount, level, or frequency of consumption. (What Reforge Growth courses talk about) In targeting new customers, the firm should not lose sight of existing customers. (Poor line expansion in SaaS). Ironically, some food firms such as Hershey's have developed smaller packaging sizes that have actually increased sales volume. (Pricing and packaging). While trying to expand total market share, the dominant firm must actively defend its current business. Boeing against Airbus. Staples against Office Depot. And Google against Yahoo! and Microsoft. How can the leader do so? The most constructive response is continuous innovation. (Marketing does product management). Six types of defense strategies when you're a dominant firm: position, flank, preemptive, counteroffensive, mobile, contraction (PM work). Market challenger strategies: attact the dominant firm (high risk, high payoff), attack similar sized firms that are not doing the job well, attack regional firms, attack status quo (lemonade insurance). Market follower strategies.. and so on.. What you'll notice is that marketing does everything except manage the supply chain. So, it decides what to build, when to build, what to price it at, and where to sell. It does NOT decide how to build it. That resides with the R&D teams and manufacturing plants. Going back to our Intuit case where the bald lady ad failed...maybe the problem isn't with marketing or with the company. It's with the process. The reason why the agency failed is because they didn't quite get it. And they didn't help shape the product. They didn't understand the nuances. And potentially, they might not have been allowed to do so. Who knows? One of the agencies I worked didn't do any research, forget shape the product. They just interviewed clients and delivered work. Things would obviously not perform. I would spend extra time outside work on the weekends to get user research done. Taylor does a good job summarizing the idea: My recommendations If we want to solve this in tech, I've got some recommendations. These are just starting points: 1) Involve growth/marketing early on. Maybe they're called the "Growth" team. But they should be a part of the process much earlier on. It's hard to market a product you don't love or have faith in. 2) Growth/Marketing should understand tech opportunities and limitations in a better way At GitHub, all their marketers know how to code. At Streamline, I took one of the most intensive design courses to speak the same language as our designers. But, I did not put the same effort into learning about frontend/backend terminologies when that would've probably been a more meta skill to develop. 3) Let marketers/growth teams write their own briefs When recruiting agencies, see if they're writing their own creative brief. Mediocre ones will do as you ask them to. Top-tier ones will write their own. A friend of mine shared Ogilvy's campaign brief if you wanted to see how it's done. #4 Ogilvy's Client Brief An example brief for Fanta. Just look at some of the questions. What do they need to know? Product facts are not usually decisive when people choose between brands, but if they are, list them here, or attach an addendum to the brief. What do they need to feel? Emotive campaigns usually sell harder. What emotional response are we looking for? (Avoid clichés like “friendly,” “trusted,” etc.) Why should they care? Brands that address issues bigger than their own category earn more time and attention. Why should people talk about our brand? Marketing has always been doing growth All this growth stuff around A/B testing, in-product tests, statistical significance has been used by marketing teams since ages. Even when there was no tech. Marketing gets a bad rap because, well most marketing is bad. So, I'd say if you worked in marketing/sales/growth or any of these ancillary functions and were laid off, it could because of one or more of these reasons You didn't truly influence the product. You haven't considered the full impact of the marketing lifecycle (awareness, activation, monetization, retention). Or maybe your work wasn't good enough — that's ok! We live and learn :) I'm happy to see that the industry is moving away from spammy marketing and looking at user journeys holistically. If you liked this article, you should read up "The Top 5 Reasons CMOs Get Fired" by Carilu Dietrich who's taken Atlassian public and is an advisor to hypergrowth companies. Thanks for reading! Best, Khushi

Everyone wants to build with AI but it's much harder to find an article from the perspective of an AI researcher, who experiences it from the other side. So, I invited Joy to write this article. He's also my brother :) Joy's experience spans both large-scale initiatives and resourceful projects on tight budgets. He's done a few cool things: Worked with the Government of India's Meteorological as well as the Agricultural department to build models for them. Was awarded a research grant of $2.8M from Google to invest in his AI research. He's also worked with me at Streamline. If you're looking to build with AI for your SaaS/tech org, reach out to him on Linkedin or via this email joylunkad@gmail.com. This blog is written to help anyone who wants to build something using AI but cannot figure out where exactly. It helps you build a strong intuition about what AI can do, especially for you, so you know how to find problems that can be solved and have a preliminary idea about how expensive it might be to build it. So let's dive right into it. What can AI do? Generally, I want you to think it can AT LEAST do whatever humans can do, given ENOUGH data and compute. Any process that has the following structure and satisfies the following constraints has an extremely high chance of being solvable by AI - Input → Some Intelligent Processing → Output Where, 1. There is readily available input and output data, or it can be procured. 2. The input contains all the necessary information for a human to generate an accurate output. There is no need to include the person's skilled prior knowledge or general knowledge in the input. And, If prior knowledge is needed to solve the problem, then you should be able to formulate it as another solvable problem, ie, follows that structure and also satisfies the constraints. Are there any sharp bits that I should keep in mind? These being the only constraints just goes to show how many problems in the world are just waiting to be solved. But just because a problem is solvable, doesn’t mean it is feasible to build a solution. Gathering enough data and compute can be extremely expensive. In general, the lesser the prior knowledge that needs to be built in, the cheaper and easier it gets. And if a problem requires a ton of prior knowledge but someone else has already incorporated it into another model, the costs to train an AI become significantly cheaper. More data and more compute almost always translate into better results and similarly, if insufficient, the AI will be brittle, and make unpredictable and hilariously stupid mistakes. You can also try breaking down a big unsolvable problem into multiple small solvable problems, chaining their inputs and outputs in such a way that their ends look like the ends of the original big problem. You can do this in cases where you can't find enough data for the big problem. The benefit of solving a big problem without breaking it apart is improved performance on the final task. This is usually a very big boost in performance comparatively. The benefit of chaining smaller problems when you could solve a big problem is that it usually significantly reduces the expenses. What do I do after identifying a problem that fits in that structure and satisfies the constraints? I recommend that you have a simple discussion about it with an AI expert. There are many datasets and models out there, either open-sourced or behind an API, that can be used to bypass the expensive steps. This talk will help you get a crude idea about how feasible it actually is, and more often than not, it would be much cheaper and faster to build than you originally imagined and at the same time, more novel/revolutionary. I could go into detail about patterns and nuances to look out for that might help you identify and differentiate between ideas that are genuinely hard/expensive and low-hanging fruits but that might make this a very long and exhausting read with diminishing returns, and even then I wouldn’t be able to make an exhaustive list. You now know everything you need to know to identify solvable problems in AI. The blog ends here but if you want to develop some pattern recognition and clear up any misconceptions, I wrote examples of some problems being solved by AI. I highly recommend going through them. Thanks for reading! Joy Lunkad Linkedin | Email: joylunkad@gmail.com

A while back, I had to run A/B tests to improve the activation rate. If you've never run in-product A/B tests before, it can be a little overwhelming so here's a simple guide on how to get started. The first test The first test we conducted showed a significant lift, increasing our core action from 14% to 21%. It was a tiny change, but it made a huge impact. And got buy-in to run more experiments. The second test After we working on activation, we went a bit deeper making sure each part of the funnel was tested. We found a user insight that we wanted to actively solve for. The result? If you look at the data below, you can see that the percentage of people that successfully went and selected a plan increased by 28%. And all other health metrics improved. The test concluded that if site traffic remained constant, we had improved trial starts by 6%. I also want to acknowledge that it was a relatively big change (involved positioning and messaging) that required a week of design and dev support. When we first launched the test variant, the test failed. So, we watched some Hotjar recordings. Discovered a few bugs and some design flaws. Everyone jumped in to help and we quickly fixed it. Had we lost faith in the test early on, we wouldn't have done anything to improve it. You can start via these 3 ways. I've over-simplified them so you know where to look and what to look for. Option 1 Step 1) Use a feature flagging tool like Flagr to conduct A/B tests. Developers will create two different environments (control and test). Step 2) Then send that data to Mixpanel, linked with the users' device IDs. Step 3) Next, analyze the data in Mixpanel. Mixpanel will directly calculate statistical significance for you, which is helpful. Option 2 Step 1) Send data from Segment directly to a tool like Statsig. Or via code. I chose Statsig because it was used by companies like Notion, Microsoft, Flipkart. It was self-serve (no need to speak to a sales rep to get started). They also offer a nice startup program if you wanted that? Statsig really speeds up the process of running experiments. You get to see all your metrics easily and can filter users with the user profile data that works best for you. I haven't completely explored the product myself, so it's a good idea to do some research on your own. In my own journey, I've evaluated Eppo, Optimizely, Taplytics, Split.io, and Launchdarkly. I finally chose Statsig. Step 2: Conduct experiments in Statsig. The process is similar: developers set up an experience, and you run a test, sending data to Statsig. Step 3: Then make a decision Option 3 Step 1) Utilize the experimentation tool in your analytics platform, like Mixpanel Experiments. Step 2) Ask developers to code the experience and run the test. What to test? To collect qualitative data for this test, I sent an email to users who signed up but did not activate in the product, asking for clear reasons why they didn't. It worked well but only after a bit of tweaking (adjust copy, timing etc). Here's the final template that worked well (h/t to Hillary for sharing): Subject: Brutal feedback for {company name} Body: Hi {first name}, I noticed that you signed up for {company name} but never did {core action}. Any chances you'd share why?—even a single sentence would go a long way in helping us improve the platform. Thanks! {founder's name} Founder at {company name} Start here with the user research if you want. Then validate with data. And finally, move on to building your test using the three options I shared above! I'm trying to better understand who my audience is. If you've got ten minutes, I would love to do a user research call: toption.org/10-minute Thanks for reading! Best, Khushi

Hey, we lost our homepage 👋 If you were to visit streamlinehq.com today, you'll go straight to the app. No marketing site. No same old "get started CTA". And you can export as many icons as you want without ever signing up. For first time users, we display a welcome modal. Take a look here: It's a bit uncommon in SaaS to drop the homepage for the app, but not all that uncommon for several B2C companies. Reddit lets users interact right away. So does Instagram. Have you ever seen Instagram's marketing site? Nope, because people don't enter Instagram via the marketing site. They land on a profile page, an individual reel, a hashtag etc. So, what should you do? Make all pages that people enter via ungated? Not so fast. Let's take a look at how LinkedIn personalizes. 1️⃣ Direct visits to a profile page have a compulsory sign up. 2️⃣ But if a user lands on a profile after searching on Google, they soften the ask a bit. People landing via organic search can bounce off. So, they have the ability to 'close the popup'. 3️⃣ And ungate it altogether when users land on a singular post or a blog article written on LinkedIn. Linkedin matches the user's intent & motivation with the level of friction they can add. And that's the ideal goal. The larger a company, the better it can segment. Everything will always be a tradeoff regardless of whether you're a large company or a small company. You have to answer a few questions: 1) Do I gate or ungate? 2) Do I make it compulsory or not? 3) Do I use a soft nudge or a much stronger one? I'd like to share how we arrived at this decision. And what was the impact (good and bad) of doing so. After that, I'll share some more examples from other companies. The evolution of our homepage This was one of the versions we had 2 years ago. There was a navbar that I can't seem to add in the screenshot so please use your imagination! And by all means, this was a pretty good homepage. In fact, I later found out that it was featured in Jeremy Moser's guide calling it the "perhaps the best landing page hero on the internet". It's nice to know that a homepage performs well when you look at the data and reports. However, it's even more special when you discover that other people reference it too! Having external positive validation makes it more challenging to iterate because you don't want to break what's working :) But we did iterate. Our homepage evolution: Second version At the time, I thought it was pretty good. People understood our value proposition so well that they repeated it verbatim in user survey interviews. We also had buttons for people to install a Figma plugin. So, people could build a habit of using Streamline in their daily workflow. Our homepage evolution: Third version We had a rebrand. And here's what it looked like. In the previous versions, I had a very strong influence on the marketing site. I dropped screenshots and built out the wireframes. But in the third version, my primary goal was to let the art shine. My brief was "It shouldn't look like anything marketing has designed." I think for marketers, we tend to own the marketing site and logged-out website experience. But there may be times when you want to give up that control. More so, when you market to technical audiences like devs or designers. Our design team is incredible so I wanted to let their craft lead the process. In my case, I shared as much context as I could and supported the design process. I focused on CTAs, pain points, and value props. But beyond that, I didn't want to offer any direction on design. I only copy-edited. And once we shipped, we were pretty happy with it. The data also confirmed it was a good move. Our homepage evolution: Fourth version 🟢 After this, we dropped the homepage and moved it to a separate page. Now, when people land on Streamline, they are greeted with a welcome modal which they can close and continue with their experience. It took 2 designers, 1 developer, and me around a week to get this live. SEO constraints: It represented a step back in terms of SEO because a lot of the on-page SEO would be lost. As long as we delivered on the UX, our rankings wouldn't tank. You may also have duplicate pages so you'll have to handle some redirections. I'd recommend visiting Search Engine Console > Links to see which pages have more backlinks before you make the 301 redirection. Emojipedia/FSymbols handle this pretty well since their traffic comes via programmatic SEO. Test, if you can Quantitative: I had also A/B tested it over the years and we had data to confirm it would play out well. Qualitative: People enter Streamline in more ways than the homepage. It's just like tools like Wikipedia, ShutterStock, and Emojipedia. People don't follow a traditional path of the usual homepage ⮕ app pattern. With or without a modal window We wondered sending them directly to the app but having that first-time landing experience would help address some of the value props and hesitations even though some users may drop off. With or without an onboarding Rows has an onboarding whereas we don't. Excalidraw is a diagramming tool without an onboarding. It would depend on how intuitive your product is. And what are the current priorities for the team. If people fail without an onboarding, then you probably need one. Do I trust my gut or data? I don't think you can truly fully be data-driven. A lot of it will also come down to what your gut says. Handing analytics We've migrated to Mixpanel for marketing and product analytics. I wrote about our implementation here. Originally, we were using Mixpanel with localStorage and had to opt for cookies instead to make the subdomain tracking work. Our inspiration We were inspired by Typefully. They have a modal window and bento designed cards. Another inspiration was rows.com. They dropped their homepage and saw a massive improvement. Their Head of Growth wrote about it here. Sanity checklist Do users get a value out of the marketing site or do they only click on the first CTA to enter the app? Do you expect activation, retention and other key metrics to go up? Or are you only going to feed the app low-quality, de-motivated traffic. Marketing site can help raise the motivation levels. Are there more ways to enter the app and is the app ungated? What would be the simplest possible way for you to validate? Maybe via a paid ad split test? Change link in bios? Email CTA? Do you have a horizontal product with lots of use cases? Do you have enough traffic to make it worth it? Will the unit economics make sense? If people reset cache in their browser, could they misuse the platform? Are you ok with that? Is it reversible or do you have a lot of problems that can arise? Why didn't I share metrics? Lying with numbers is pretty easy and I could do that if I wanted to. But honestly, I don't trust when I see claims like "boosted revenue by 30%", or "bounce rate decreased by 24%" because more often than not, it only shows a part of the picture. I often question these claims. What if your bounce rate decreased but you only had 1000 visits a month? What if the activation rate increased because you found product-channel fit this month? If I did want to share numbers, I'd have to share everything with you. - User count - Activation metrics - Retention data - Vanity metrics like bounce rates - Qualitative feedback - Before vs after - With modal vs without modal - Impact on enterprise sales and so much more. Only then, should you trust my data. But since that might be too much information, I guess the only data point that you'd need from me is, "Hey this worked. It may or may not work for you but I hope you're inspired!". But you can still verify by some simple math: Say you have 100k visitors to the homepage. Of these, only 20% click through while the rest drop off. You could get that click through rate to a 100%. Maybe users are slightly less motivated and activate at 15% instead of 25%. Control = 100k*20%*25% = 5k users activated Test = 100k*15% = 15k users activated I'm trying to better understand who my audience is. If you've got ten minutes, I would love to do a user research call: toption.org/10-minute Thanks, Khushi

No one dreams that they will become a marketer when they grow up. You could be a scientist pushing humanity forward. A surgeon saving lives. Or even a founder solving problems. Marketers? We're most commonly know to spam. Growth practitioners? We're most commonly know to suck the life out of a good product. Clearly, everyone hates marketers. It's not a secret. So, why on earth would I knowingly choose this profession? Re: "I love you" I once sent a newsletter. The response I got was "I love you" from one of our users. In a world where marketers spam, this is my KPI. Where people actually want to hear from you. Look, I know. Marketers don't build a product. All we do is amplify. We help good products reach more people. Like journalists, we amplify stories. Too often, good products die out because no one thought how to bring it to market. And build a real business around it. It's not this black and white with "good" and "bad". Amongst all of this, my aim is simple. Great products deserve to win, and then some more. And I do that in four ways: acquisition, activation, monetization, and retention. I almost never touch the core product but strongly influence the product depending on what the market wants and what we can win against. If your goal is entrepreneurship... Then solving marketing & growth is a great skillset to have. Consumer behavior is notoriously hard. People don't act the way they think. They don't think the way they act. It's as much of an art as its a science. Your company depends on you... Who do you think gets fired if the company fails to make money? Company doesn't perform well? They say "oh, our marketing isn't great". CMOs have the shortest tenure. Driving income is a huge responsibility that marketing and growth team shoulder together. The life of the company depends on how many people resonate with you and draw money out of their pockets. Marketing teams can no longer be siloed into these awareness-only buckets as they have been historically. You have to influence the product. You have to be on top of bugs, monetization model iterations, algorithm changes etc. You can't be accountable for revenue or poor performance if you don't have influence over every part of the company. * By influence, I don't mean ownership. Failure and feedback loops Marketing and growth teams are close to the customers in two ways. Failure is real. It cannot be sugarcoated by user count or qualitative feedback. Instead, if you're not making money, you're responsible. We have the shortest feedback loops. Product takes months to build. Design iterations take longer. Engineering has to get through several sprints to ship. We can ship an experiment and train our intuition almost immediately. It's as real as it gets. Customer support is close to customers but doesn't have revenue accountability (except for mature companies). We talk to customers to map out their buyer journey and trigger points. We know how we compare to our competition and what changes are they making in their product in real-time. Having short feedback loops and being close to customers gives us so much more insight into what works and doesn't. Given all that context, here are some founding principles of how I think about marketing and growth. My growth and marketing manifesto 1. No traffic for the sake of traffic Target people that will get value out of your product. It's easy to believe every channel can work for you. If you're a B2B brand selling solar home installations that cost tens of thousands of dollars, posting generic drowsy content on IG is never going to work. Be honest to yourself and look for early signals to lean into it or pivot away. Essentially, there are two types of users we want: 1) People who can get real value out of our product 2) People who offer us feedback to improve 2. Ship with intensity and urgency Focus on things that matter. And then execute best you can. I've made mistakes of hiring people that simply cannot get things done. Or they need a hundred feedback rounds to ship even the little things. It's hard to find people who love what they do so much so that intensity and urgency is a by-product. They don't count the hours they spend. And they *want* to spend their weekends advancing in their field. If you don't love what you do, you'll just get burnt out. To win, you need four things. Mediocrity is competitive. But there's always room at the top. And that's where you should want to go to. Here's a tweet by the founder of Runaway to better explain what I mean: 3. Never market alone Find a horse to ride and piggyback on anything. You're a small boat in an ocean. You cannot make big waves by doing it yourself. Let the wave carry you. 5. Find out what is working So you can double down on what is working and what isn't. Very hard to execute in real life though because buyer journeys aren't simple. I used a lot of stuff at Streamline to get clarity (qualitative interviews, post-purchase surveys, product marketing analytics data, marketing mix models). Start with the easy stuff. Then layer on. 6. Chase insights, not revenue Revenue is an outcome and focusing too much over it just leads to stress. I hardly check Stripe to see how much money we make every week. Instead, I mine insights. And use those to form winning strategies. And eventually, you'll see you've come pretty far. See how one insight helped us reach 60 million users. 7. No fluff If something's not working, we have to be honest about it. Cut down fluff from everywhere. I don't like to spend time working on stuff that truly doesn't matter. And hate it when copy is unnecessarily wordy or stuffed with adjectives. 8. Play with sportsmanship No belittling competitors. At Streamline, our competitors often promote us. Vincent promotes our competitor launches. It's kind of weirdly healthy. It won't apply to every industry but we don't throw shade. 9. Be honest with your audience, no clickbait-y content or dark patterns I don't like to receive click-baity zero value content. And I don't want users to receive content like this either. It's simple. Treat your users like they're already customers. 10. Be curious and invite feedback Feedback is a gift. I often publish my work in Slack inviting feedback from whoever is willing to give it. Earlier in my career, I would feel bad when I received harsh feedback. But now, I actively seek out feedback. And it really helped me improve. 11. Optimize for happiness I took a class at Essec called the Science of Happiness and it taught me more about psychology than anything ever could. Many people aren't truly happy. We are in a loneliness pandemic. 😶‍🌫️ It honestly doesn't cost much to put a smile on people's faces. It's free to do. At least, most of the times. An example of this is when I had to send a discount code to a guy named Marq. The coupon code I sent to him was called "MarqMyWords," and he was surprised I took that time out to be unnecessarily creative. When I provide harsh feedback to someone on my team, I now try to do it in a way that brings them joy. It's challenging, and I admit that I fail at times. 12. Aim for inbounds, over outbounds Over the years, I've tried outbound multiple times and realized that the ROI never works out. Maybe they churn faster or the conversion rate is lower or you're terribly impacting your brand equity. Inbounds are the way to go. Here's an example. I received an inbound message from Shaan Puri back in 2021 that said something along the lines of if I was consulting for growth marketing or had an agency. Shaan Puri is pretty well known! There was no way I could reach him via outbounds. Even though it didn't work out, it made me really happy to wake up to this message. You might argue, "Hey Khushi, it's probably because you're bad at outbound". Well, maybe I am. But I do know that I don't like to be on the receiving end of outbound sales messages. Asking for feedback via outbounds is great though but direct sales wasn't something I could ever see work. And the only time outbound sales sort of worked for me was when Stefan Bader from cello.so reached out. It was mostly because I was already interested in his work and I sent him a connection request first. Thank you for reading my rather long manifesto. I'll make it shorter in the future. It is essentially a guideline about how I think about marketing and growth. And why I am still excited by a field that nearly everyone hates. I'm trying to better understand who my audience is. If you've got ten minutes, I would love to do a user research call: toption.org/10-minute Best, Khushi