Growth Experiments & Playbooks (Wiz Abdulla)

In this episode of A Whole New Level, Level’s Head of Growth Ben Grynol sits down with investor, advisor, and founder of Space Cadet Wiz Abdulla to share how he thinks about growth and how the way that shapes the experiments being run at Levels.

• Why there is no one size fits all growth playbook
• The dangers of following a prescriptive playbook
• Ben’s principles for growth
• How to think about growth investments
• Why an acquisition focus might not be the right answer
• How the Levels team iterates on experiments
• The difference between being data driven and data informed

There is no one size fits all growth playbook

Ben argues that growth tactics and strategy need to be tailored to every company rather than copying what others do.

There’s often this advice people take growth as being a prescriptive thing where you can just replicate what other companies have done…The misconception is that you can just replicate these same exercises, these growth experiments and apply them and expect similar results. And the challenge is that all companies have different people, different skillsets, different products, different amounts of capital to deploy. But the heuristics that are used should stay the same. So it’s not the execution tactics that can be replicated but the heuristics, and those heuristics are run a ton of experiments. Do them really fast, get feedback and learn from them, decide whether or not you should move them forward.

The dangers of following a prescriptive playbook

Many companies follow a set “playbook” based on their industry and business model but that likely limits their success.

So many times people will say, hey, give me the exact playbook for X, Y, and Z. And what it comes down to is there are all of these things that might work in different, let’s say different sports even. So let’s call like enterprise is a sport and consumer is a sport in the same way that football and hockey are different sports. There are certain elements like the way that you see the field or see the ice or see the court, those will have overlap in the Venn diagram. But you can’t be prescriptive of, okay, go long in the way you would with football, go long and I’m going to bomb you a pass. It’s like that play doesn’t work in hockey that well. Sometimes it might, but it doesn’t always. And so sometimes people just say, “Hey, give me the playbook that you guys use, and I’m going to apply it.”

The 3 principles of growth

Ben has 3 questions that he answers to set the growth strategy before running experiments.

It’s important to say, cool, what is growth? How do you think about it? And then third is what are experiments? And the reason being is that often experiments are misinterpreted for paid. People think experiments are synonymous with paid acquisition through social. A lot of times it’ll get drilled down exactly through that channel. And an experiment doesn’t have to be paid by any means. What an experiment is is what is your hypothesis about how to reach whatever goal that is? So if your goal is enterprise focus, it’s landing a big whale customer. What experiment can you run to try to reach a bunch of them really quickly? And it’s not necessarily focused on paid. Is there something you can do to grow a network of outside salespeople as contractors to get 1,000 calls out really quickly to see what feedback comes in? Maybe, that’s an experiment.

The 4 pillars of growth at Levels

Growth at levels is focused around 4 pillars that combine to form a flywheel.

When thinking about growth, the easiest thing was to break down what is Levels? Maybe it’s a little bit philosophical. Not what is Levels from a product standpoint, but what is Levels as far as an ecosystem. And the four pillars that were identified is members, content, community, and partnerships. So those pillars create somewhat of a flywheel that we call this ecosystem or the movement of Levels. And a movement being a cult brand and a cult community. And there’s a bit of overlap between members and community, but members, everything pertaining to UXR like user experience, research, customer engagement or member engagement, we’ll call it, so member support, member engagement.

How to think about growth investments

Ben has an interesting model for how to deploy capital and resources against experiments.

This is something that we talk about often. And the idea is that it gets really easy to, one, think you should focus on the wrong things. That being we need to acquire customers. I think a lot of people pursue what they consider marketing activities way too early. And there’s a big difference, hat tip to Seth Godin, there’s a big difference between advertising and marketing, they’re totally different things. So people think, hey, I’m going to run some paid social ads, they don’t even know what part of the funnel they’re running them for. Let’s assume somebody is starting out early, and this is not a bad thing to not have a lens on growth, but it’s just sometimes people have capital to deploy. Even if it’s 1,000 bucks, it’s still $1,000 is $1,000, it’s a lot of money. If you’re doing it at scale, 10 grand or 100 grand or whatever amount of money on a weekly, monthly, yearly basis. It doesn’t matter the amount, it’s still the way to think about it.

Acquiring more customers might not be the answer

Many growth programs focus on acquisition but to unless it aligns with your long term goals it may do more harm than good.

when we think back to these goals, does acquiring more customers or members, acquiring more members or getting more people into the beta help us achieve that? And it’s like, no, what helps us achieve it? Well, probably creating some content, spreading the message, getting a bunch of people engaged. And then all of a sudden you go, whoa, we now have this one tiny piece of content about metabolically, Robert Lustig’s book, and we’ve helped to spread his message and amplify that. So that’s the way we think about these initiatives of we won’t compete for three seconds of attention and try to hack people’s attention through whatever means to get short-term gain.

How can you get creative like Casey Neistat

Copying what others do leads to a average results, looking for ways to be creative unlocks new potential.

don’t just look at what somebody else did and think that you should do that too. That’s inherently a bad idea. So it’s like, well, every other SaaS company runs performance ads, so we should too or we’re getting our lunch eaten in search, we have to compete. All you’re doing is you’re competing for spent, it’s ridiculous. So don’t do that. Now, the other side is move really fast, be scrappy, move fast, make decisions really, really fast. Assume the majority of decisions are two-way door decisions, not going to sink the ship. Move really, really, really fast on those and just start to learn…Casey Neistat is such a great example of growth hacking. It’s kind of a nerdy word because sometimes people go, oh, growth hacking is so cliché.

But what did it do when he got, I think it was like 25,000 bucks from Nike. And they’re like, “Hey man … This was right when he was taking off as a vlogger, “Hey man, go and make us a commercial, an ad. Go make us some ad, you have full autonomy to do whatever you want.” So what does an ad mean? Well, most people would define it as, okay, there has to be some branding, it’s got to be really focused on their vertical. That being some sport. Well, what’s the most prominent sport they do? Let’s assume it’s basketball. It’s going to show a lot of basketball in it, there’s going to be some call to action. Probably get your dunks now, whatever it is. And that’s just the wrong approach. So Casey did exactly what every founder should do, he’s like, “Man, what could I do with 25 grand? What would be hilarious?” That’s always a nice way of looking at something is to get creative.

How the Levels Culture project came about

Experiments at Levels start with internal conversations and testing.

you start to have a conversation publicly visible within the team and that gets massaged over time. So we had a conversation about this exact thing, let’s say it was somewhere around May. Let’s record our culture at Levels. And sometimes those videos seem or that content can seem a little bit contrived, can seem inauthentic and just a little too salesy. So we thought, hey, let’s try it. We ran this experiment, did it with as low amount of time as possible. Everyone recorded looms of themselves independently and we stitched it together and we’re like, “It’s actually not bad. What does it look like if we do a better iteration?” And then we did that and then we did another one and another, and it keeps going. Now, this has actually become this thing which we call the culture documentation project. And it’s developing to this day into a set of tools or some content that we can share with other founders about the way we communicate as a team and give it the same caveat that we’re giving this conversation. Hey, this is not prescriptive advice, it just happens to be the way that we work. If there’s anything you can pull out of it, great.

Launching the Coke Challenge experiment

It’s a misconception that all experiments need an immediately measurable outcome to be a success.

Experiments don’t need to have some immediate outcome either, they’re just this iterative process where you don’t plan on the final outcome being the outcome that it is. But it leads to some new place, and it ends up maybe being a core part of a product feature or business model. So back to the story, we ended up drinking Coke. We did an episode about this actually, so it’s the Coke Challenge it’s called. We ended up drinking Coke, we did the exact same thing. We found internally that, hey, if you do physical activity, it does bring down your glucose Levels. Created a blog post about it, reached out to a core group of members and said, “Hey, do you want to participate in the first ever community challenge submission? We’re going to send you Coke.” We wanted to make sure that we were controlling for, it was nerdy, and it was so funny and cool, but we’re controlling for product.

Iterating on experiments to unlock new growth

Experiments might start small but by moving quickly and iterating they can take on an entirely new life.

We sent everybody Coke, and … they did this experiment, they felt engaged in it. A lot of people were posting UGC, and that was cool. The next step of it was totally unplanned, but it’s now become a core part of our team and the way we engage and the community. And so Josh when he was at SpaceX, every time they would do something meaningful like put a rocket into the air, Elon would give everybody on the team a patch, a space patch, they’re called mission patches. And they’re these coveted items that he has and all of his friends they have to this day, he’s like, “This is going to be passed down in my family forever, this is so meaningful.” A lot of them are framed. Sam and Josh were like, “Man, what if we make a mission patch for the Coke challenge? Totally unexpected, people have no idea it’s coming. We’re just going to make these embroidered things, and we’re going to send it to people and they can keep it. And that will be you start to collect them.” And so we did it and sent them to people and they’re like, “Whoa, this is entirely cool.” Now, fast forward to today, we have this full stack of mission patches.

The importance of being data informed vs data driven

Many companies want to be data driven, but Ben says that approach can actually lead to missing the things that are aligned with your goals.

There are two things to highlight which come up again and again. Not everything that is measured matters and not everything that matters can be measured, that’s one of them. And the other one is what gets measured gets managed. So thinking about it this way. Too often, data is unbelievably important. Data is great when you are data informed but not data-driven. And it’s counterintuitive I think to sometimes what people say, oh, we have to be data-driven. It’s like, yes, use data, data is great. But the reason you should be data informed and not driven is data-driven implies that anytime you get data that says, hey, here is the outcome or here are the results. If you index on that, it will lead you to make decisions where you’re not using any of your own insight or intuition to say, “Well, that actually is bad data.”

And I use this example all the time. If I ask Penelope, my five-year-old, what do you want for breakfast? 10 times out of 10 she’s going to say chocolate or ice cream or some ridiculous thing. And so if I’m like, “Well, the data’s says, so it must be true, and that’s the right choice,” there is no discretion on my part to be like, “Man, you can’t eat that, that’s not very good for you.” So data informed is despite the data saying that, my discretion says we’re going against the data. Now, it’s important to measure certain things. And this gets back to not everything that is measured matters and not everything that matters can be measured.

Wiz Abdulla: We know that you all have come up with some interesting marketing experiments that you’ve tested every time. And I think that maybe this is a block as well for some founders, especially in the early days. Pre-seed, small team, your head is so full of all of the fires that you’re trying to put out that maybe it’s hard to take that space to think outside of the box and be creative. Or maybe it’s not a practice skill for you.

Ben Grynol: I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health, and this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is a whole new level. When it comes to growth, there really isn’t a playbook. Maybe there’s a book of plays to give Andy Schabelman a hat tip. He’s the one who brought this up in a conversation we had many months ago. But there’s often this advice people take growth as being a prescriptive thing where you can just replicate what other companies have done.

Ben Grynol: And the misconception is that if you are in a B2B space versus a B2C, that’s business to business versus business to consumer. Levels is very much a consumer facing company. The misconception is that you can just replicate these same exercises, these growth experiments and apply them and expect similar results. And the challenge is that all companies have different people, different skillsets, different products, different amounts of capital to deploy. But the heuristics that are used should stay the same. So it’s not the execution tactics that can be replicated but the heuristics, and those heuristics are run a ton of experiments. Do them really fast, get feedback and learn from them, decide whether or not you should move them forward.

Ben Grynol: And so if a growth experiment is successful, move it forward. If it’s not, consider retiring it. And you get to this point where you get a whole bunch of experiments going at once, and sometimes you have to make a conscious effort, conscious decision to retire some of those experiments. That’s project debt, it’s the ongoing accumulation of a bunch of projects that you have taking place at one time. And so Wiz Abdulla, founder of Spacecadet ventures, also a friend from many years ago, more than 20 years ago and the person who introduced me to Levels, he and I sat down and we talked about how different companies at different stages, startups, whether you’re a team of three or five people or a growth stage company with hundreds of people, how these teams can think about execution and growth.

Ben Grynol: And the outcome was that all companies have to take everything into account and decide what’s right for them. They have to figure out what skills they need to reach customers, reach the people they’re trying to reach, the members, the consumers, the users depending on the type of product, how they can reach them, how they can do it quickly, how they can do it effectively, and how they can think about deploying capital against it. It was a very cool opportunity to flip the lens, and Wiz was the host for this one. So we sat down and we had a deep discussion about our growth strategy and this document that we refer to internally. And we share with many people on our cap table, even people in the community, different founders who asked to see it. And so here’s where we kick things off.

Wiz Abdulla: I had a chance to go through the doc that you sent me, thank you for sharing. It was also interesting to see some of the secrets in there too. I took some rough notes to help guide the conversation, just broad areas that I want to hit. Just as a reminder, what sparks this is that every day I have portfolio founders that reach out to me and they’re like, “Hey, thinking about how to approach growth, we’re still very early.” Maybe don’t have the immediate resources to bring someone on full time, but at least want to start fleshing out a plan and putting early pieces in place. And I think that most of my feedback for those companies has been, hey, best thing you can start doing is just running small little experiments to see what works and what doesn’t. And through experimentation, you’re going to get clear on your own value prop and messaging and personas, et cetera, and it’s actually going to feed the rest of the company.

Wiz Abdulla: It’s much like getting onto a sales call in the early days of selling software and getting that real feedback from the market even when it’s not necessarily what you want to hear. And every time I share that, I’m always reminded of that marketing experiment sheet that you did. I had a chance to look at the new updated one. And that was the thing that interested me the most is how to help founders understand that acquisition doesn’t have to be focused on the low hanging fruit that most people think of, whether it’s Google paid ads or Facebook ads or Instagram ads. There’s actually this whole world of interesting opportunities that are way more niche and have the potential to return way more than just straight paid ad spending.

Wiz Abdulla: That was the initial seed of what I wanted to chat through with you. But I thought that we could do a funnel approach, start wide, just talk about growth in general and then move into growth at Levels. So I think it does make sense to keep this maybe 60 to 70% Levels centric and then maybe 30 to 40% just growth centric or outsider general so that other people can think about how to take some of this stuff to their own companies and then maybe finally digging down into specifically growth marketing experimentation, some of those tests and experiments that you were running. Are you still running those?

Ben Grynol: Yeah, we do experiments all the time. Probably a good starting point is talking about three specific things. One is everything that we’re about to discuss is not prescriptive advice, and that can’t be reiterated enough. The reason being is it so many times people will say, hey, give me the exact playbook for X, Y, and Z. And what it comes down to is there are all of these things that might work in different, let’s say different sports even. So let’s call like enterprise is a sport and consumer is a sport in the same way that football and hockey are different sports. There are certain elements like the way that you see the field or see the ice or see the court, those will have overlap in the Venn diagram. But you can’t be prescriptive of, okay, go long in the way you would with football, go long and I’m going to bomb you a pass.

Ben Grynol: It’s like that play doesn’t work in hockey that well. Sometimes it might, but it doesn’t always. And so sometimes people just say, “Hey, give me the playbook that you guys use, and I’m going to apply it.” And it’s like, well, right now what we’re focused on, we’re a consumer facing company. And so if you’re an enterprise facing company, some of these, whether they are growth experiments or growth hacks or approaches to sales and approaches to paid acquisition, you can’t just say here’s the playbook and run it. It’s always important to prime things with that and then to get into the two other things, what is growth and what are experiments? So growth, the way that we look at growth, and different companies will define it differently, growth is a blend of sales and marketing. Some companies, if a company is an enterprise company, growth might just be considered outside sales.

Ben Grynol: That is growth, it is growing your customer base to help grow revenue. Consumer facing companies growth might be … Actually, let’s back up. At SaaS companies, so they’re B2B focused, SaaS companies, and let’s assume there aren’t any inbound or outbound sales, it’s just paid acquisition through certain platforms or channels where they can reach those customers. So if you’re a B2B SaaS company and you think your best opportunity to engage customers happens to be LinkedIn, people might spend a lot of time and money trying to acquire customers and do so through whatever activities they’re doing. They take a paid approach. At a consumer facing company, you might do what’s considered more like growth hacking. It’s how can you grow your consumer base, how can you grow your DA use, your daily active or weekly active or monthly active users so that you can grow the platform, get deeper network effects by having more people on board, et cetera?

Ben Grynol: And there are all of these approaches to do that. So it’s important to say, cool, what is growth? How do you think about it? And then third is what are experiments? And the reason being is that often experiments are misinterpreted for paid. People think experiments are synonymous with paid acquisition through social. A lot of times it’ll get drilled down exactly through that channel. And an experiment doesn’t have to be paid by any means. What an experiment is is what is your hypothesis about how to reach whatever goal that is? So if your goal is enterprise focus, it’s landing a big whale customer. What experiment can you run to try to reach a bunch of them really quickly? And it’s not necessarily focused on paid. Is there something you can do to grow a network of outside salespeople as contractors to get 1,000 calls out really quickly to see what feedback comes in? Maybe, that’s an experiment.

Ben Grynol: Is an experiment … Here’s another one that’s consumer focused. For us, an experiment might be, hey, we’re going to run … Actually, let’s use one we just did. I wonder if the community is going to be stoked if we do a book club with one of our advisors on their new books. Would they come to it? That’s a question we want to answer. Will they engage with it? Can we create content from it that gets reach and engagement? And if so, is that successful? And so we ran this book club I think it was about six weeks ago with Dr. Robert Lustig with his new book metabolically, which is great. And people should read if they haven’t had a chance to check it out.

Ben Grynol: But the community came, they were super pumped because they got to engage with an author directly. We sent them all books for free, and then we recorded the content from it and put it out. Well, within like a week, this piece of content from Lustig. We have very low subscribers, we’ll call it 400 on YouTube. Within a week, that had like over 300 hours of views. And you’re like, okay, so people are engaging with this content, that means that over time that’s going to keep compounding. I think this might be a good ‘growth hack’ or a growth experiment. So it’s like how do we keep iterating on that? That being N of one, well, what if you have N of 1,000 and you do 1,000 of these micro experiments, how can you reach people? I think those are the three principles is like, what is growth? What do experiments look like? And then saying, hey, there is no prescriptive playbook that works for everyone for growth.

Wiz Abdulla: I really like those three principles. I think that’s great primer, you want to jump in and start?

Ben Grynol: I think we’re already in man.

Wiz Abdulla: I’m used to more formal podcasts setups where there’s an intro and then we jumped straight into it.

Ben Grynol: No man, this is the sausage getting made.

Wiz Abdulla: All right, cool. I like that definition of growth and how it’s not really cookie cutter. And of course you need to think about the different things that are important to you. I mean, you and I were talking about that a bit earlier in the call. Let me ask you, you came to Levels pretty early. When you thought about what should Levels look like, sorry, what should growth look like at Levels or what could it look like, how did you approach that? What did your first 30, 60, 90 days look like?

Ben Grynol: It was part of this exercise. Actually prior to coming on board, there were some technical exercises where you started to think about what is a flywheel for Levels, what does it look like? What does a 30, 60, 90-day plan look like? And the reason to separate the two is the flywheel becomes this foundation for an ecosystem or this foundation moving forward that we still revert back to to this day. Ironically, it was what we had discussed in the technical exercises. And we still use it, it’s become this foundation for growth at the company. The 30, 60, 90 is more based on tactics like line items saying within 30 days, one, two and three, here’s some things we can do. So let’s go into the flywheel first.

Ben Grynol: When thinking about growth, the easiest thing was to break down what is Levels? Maybe it’s a little bit philosophical. Not what is Levels from a product standpoint, but what is Levels as far as an ecosystem. And the four pillars that were identified is members, content, community, and partnerships. So those pillars create somewhat of a flywheel that we call this ecosystem or the movement of Levels. And a movement being a cult brand and a cult community. And there’s a bit of overlap between members and community, but members, everything pertaining to UXR like user experience, research, customer engagement or member engagement, we’ll call it, so member support, member engagement.

Ben Grynol: And that doesn’t tie into the responsibility of growth, it’s not a vertical that we work on day in, day out. That’s more ops focused as far as support, member experience, but it’s still an important pillar. Content is pretty self-explanatory, it’s create a bunch of content, distribute it across platforms, make sure it’s valuable content, make sure from a health perspective if we’re doing anything related to health that it is factual and accurate. Without a doubt, that is a non-negotiable. We’ve gotten into this segment of content that we call inside the company. And it’s just being very transparent with investor updates in our all hands meetings every week, the Friday forum videos, which we share. And they become these micro playbooks I guess for different startups and different founders where they say, “Hey, it’s really helpful to understand the way that you think about asynchronous communication as one factor.”

Ben Grynol: Community is everything pertaining to community engagement. So it’s things like the book club. We talked about things like doing community calls where they get to engage with Josh, Casey, Sam, David, Andrew, any of the founders or people in the founding team. And that’s pretty meaningful in the sense that if you are a fan of, assume that you are a fan of SpaceX early on, maybe that’s a bad example because Elon already had a profile. Assuming you’re a fan of PayPal. So early on you had the chance to engage with Elon and Thiel and Jeff Jordan and Reed Hoffman and all of these different people, you could go on these calls. I don’t think they would have done that because that wasn’t exactly their MO by the sounds of it.

Ben Grynol: But assume they did this and you were a big eBay seller, that would probably be the coolest thing to think back. It’s kind of like I remember seeing Neil Young in a bar in 1967 in Winnipeg, and they’re seven people there. It’s kind of the same thing. So the community feels a sense of engagement when they have the opportunity to engage with Dr. Casey Means who they hear on a podcast. It’s very, very cool. So everything related to community and community engagement. And then the last is partnerships, that is everything to do with influencer, affiliates, a lot of the podcasters that we work with in the space like Kelly LeVeque, Mark Hyman, all these people that are thought leaders in health and wellness. And you can extrapolate that across a vertical, so it doesn’t have to be health and wellness as a segment or Ben Greenfield and Dave Asprey at Biohackers as a segment. There are so many thought leaders that we can have partnerships with.

Wiz Abdulla: Those are great four pillars. Let me bring the conversation back to Winnipeg and do my duty as a fellow Winnipegger.

Ben Grynol: Let’s do it.

Wiz Abdulla: You previously worked on the growth team at Skip, which for those of you who don’t know is a Canadian unicorn. How did the pillars at Skip compare to the pillars at Levels? Thinking back to growth is not prescriptive, you need to think about what’s important at the company. Obviously things like members and community and partners would look way different at another company. And you may not even have those pillars. Did you have pillars at Skip? And then what were the things that you focused at there?

Ben Grynol: Yeah. So the pillars always relate to this flywheel. To go into Skip in a sec but to tie it back to these members content, community partnerships. The reason it’s a flywheel or enough of an ecosystem is members come on board. Right now we’re in beta as of October 13th 2021. Members come on board, in general, they create content. A lot of them make UGC, User-Generated Content that engages people in the community. The community engagement leads to more awareness as far as partners or partnerships go. Partners inbound, that creates more members, members create more content. So that is the flywheel, that’s what we call this movement. Back to Skip, so our flywheel was, and Skip for anyone who’s not familiar is a three-sided marketplace in on-demand food delivery. So it is basically DoorDash for Canada. It’s a national startup with national presence or it’s the de facto player in Canada. Three-sided marketplace, couriers, restaurants, customers.

Ben Grynol: And then we still considered … There was actually a fourth pillar, it’s just not part of the flywheel, but there were four pillars to serve. That being internal, so operations. And the reason it’s important to note that is that we had the different stacks, courier, resto, customer. And then internal, well, our internal stack we called live ops, live operations, which was our own software, our own logistics platform that had all the systems. It was the brain of Skip, everything integrated into one place. And the reason we needed that pillar is if that was broken, nothing works. So you get pretty clear flywheel or network effects. The more density you have from a marketplace perspective, the more restaurants that come on board. Restaurants being optionality in a restaurant focused marketplace, optionality is the number one value prop for different customers.

Ben Grynol: The more restaurants that come on board, the more customers that want to order. The more customers that want to order, the more couriers orders there are, the more opportunity there is for couriers to make money delivering orders because you need the density. The more restaurants want to come on board because they’re getting more orders and that goes around and around. So we had three flywheel pillars but really four that made the whole operation come together.

Wiz Abdulla: Let’s drill one level down from the flywheel. I mean, I totally understand the Levels flywheel and love how those four pillars come together. I was reading your Levels growth playbook last night. I think it was an excerpt from the manifesto. I want to read it, and I want to ask you about the philosophy behind it because I think this is actually the foundation below the pillars. And I think it’s interesting to hear at that bedrock level how you all think about growth to also help other companies listening to this maybe understand that thinking at this fundamental of a level really opens your mind to possibilities beyond just dumping money into paid Google ads.

Wiz Abdulla: So the quote, the excerpt was growth at Levels is a blend of sales and marketing activities. However, the goals of growth are not just to drive revenue, order volume, and member signups. Rather, the responsibility of growth is to create a sustainable path for building a lifetime technology company. I mean, that is at its most fundamental level, what it sounds like the Levels growth team is up to. Tell me about that philosophy and how you came to it but also how it shows up in the broader plan and in the activities down to the smallest tactics that you pursue.

Ben Grynol: This is something that we talk about often. And the idea is that it gets really easy to, one, think you should focus on the wrong things. That being we need to acquire customers. I think a lot of people pursue what they consider marketing activities way too early. And there’s a big difference, hat tip to Seth Godin, there’s a big difference between advertising and marketing, they’re totally different things. So people think, hey, I’m going to run some paid social ads, they don’t even know what part of the funnel they’re running them for. Let’s assume somebody is starting out early, and this is not a bad thing to not have a lens on growth, but it’s just sometimes people have capital to deploy. Even if it’s 1,000 bucks, it’s still $1,000 is $1,000, it’s a lot of money. If you’re doing it at scale, 10 grand or 100 grand or whatever amount of money on a weekly, monthly, yearly basis. It doesn’t matter the amount, it’s still the way to think about it.

Ben Grynol: So running ads and trying to hack attention isn’t actually benefiting you if you’re not hitting the platform right. You’re not giving the right media, that could be audio, video, visual media or written media. Maybe you get the headline wrong, maybe you get the actual type of ad wrong like you’re running a conversion ad and you actually need to start top of funnel. So conversion being bottom of the funnel, you actually need to run an awareness ad because nobody has a clue what Wiz’s chainsaw company inc is or does. Do you cut down trees or do you … And again, this is a bad example because if you are going for something that is commoditize and there’s a more direct CTA, you’re targeting people who have dead trees in their yard somehow. Sure, that might work.

Ben Grynol: But the idea is you can’t just hit social or hit paid ads and say, hey, this is going to work. And so backing it up to the way we think about it is how do we do things that are based on creating true value for members and deploying capital against that as opposed to just saying how do we acquire more members? The two standout examples are, hey, we have a hypothesis to run this book club. Well, let’s just send everybody books, that costs us money. Assume it costs 1,000 bucks. We decided to spend $1,000 to send people books instead of running paid ads for 1,000 bucks. Maybe we got more immediate conversions but that isn’t helping with our underlying goal. And we’ve got these three actually overarching goals for growth. One is to become an NPS unicorn, which means to have a score of 90 and above. Something that we made up internally and doesn’t actually exist, but we just refer to it. So NPS unicorn. Two to impact a billion people, and three to create a movement.

Ben Grynol: So in doing that, all we’re trying to do is educate the world kind of like Paul Revere going door to door being like, “Hey, there’s a problem here.” We’re trying to do the same thing with the metabolic health crisis and say, “Hey world, there’s this epidemic. And it’s a pretty serious thing you should pay attention.” Here’s a bunch of information about it, that’s all we want you to do is read this, just read this information and truly think about it and change behavior. If you need more help, we’re here to help you.

Ben Grynol: And so when we think back to these goals, does acquiring more customers or members, acquiring more members or getting more people into the beta help us achieve that? And it’s like, no, what helps us achieve it? Well, probably creating some content, spreading the message, getting a bunch of people engaged. And then all of a sudden you go, whoa, we now have this one tiny piece of content about metabolically, Robert Lustig’s book, and we’ve helped to spread his message and amplify that. So that’s the way we think about these initiatives of we won’t compete for three seconds of attention and try to hack people’s attention through whatever means to get short-term gain.

Wiz Abdulla: I think that when a lot of early stage founders think about growth I think the mind probably does first go to that short-term growth of, hey, we’ve built the first version of product, great, what comes next? User acquisition. All right, how do we do that? I don’t know, I’ve heard about Google ads, let’s do that. What I’m hearing from you is that maybe a better way to think about it is thinking more from first principles and a more holistic perspective of, hey, what do we really need? Maybe it isn’t actually just to jam a bunch of users into this beta product, maybe there’s something before that that would actually be more helpful today.

Wiz Abdulla: And it sounds like you guys did the work of going through that thinking of what is it that Levels actually needs today? We’re not in growth mode, we’re trying to maybe build top of the funnel awareness so that when we are ready for growth mode we’ve got a lot of leavers to pull on then. I guess my question to you would be how would you recommend that an early stage pre-seed company, let’s say a team of three co-founders, how should they start having these conversations and thinking through what is it that they need instead of jumping straight to user acquisition?

Ben Grynol: So the first thing is, to reiterate this, don’t just look at what somebody else did and think that you should do that too. That’s inherently a bad idea. So it’s like, well, every other SaaS company runs performance ads, so we should too or we’re getting our lunch eaten in search, we have to compete. All you’re doing is you’re competing for spent, it’s ridiculous. So don’t do that. Now, the other side is move really fast, be scrappy, move fast, make decisions really, really fast. Assume the majority of decisions are two-way door decisions, not going to sink the ship. Move really, really, really fast on those and just start to learn. Backing it up, it’s like … I mean, Casey Neistat is such a great example of growth hacking. It’s kind of a nerdy word because sometimes people go, oh, growth hacking is so cliché.

Ben Grynol: But what did it do when he got, I think it was like 25,000 bucks from Nike. And they’re like, “Hey man … This was right when he was taking off as a vlogger, “Hey man, go and make us a commercial, an ad. Go make us some ad, you have full autonomy to do whatever you want.” So what does an ad mean? Well, most people would define it as, okay, there has to be some branding, it’s got to be really focused on their vertical. That being some sport. Well, what’s the most prominent sport they do? Let’s assume it’s basketball. It’s going to show a lot of basketball in it, there’s going to be some call to action. Probably get your dunks now, whatever it is. And that’s just the wrong approach. So Casey did exactly what every founder should do, he’s like, “Man, what could I do with 25 grand? What would be hilarious?”

Ben Grynol: That’s always a nice way of looking at something is to get creative. It’s like what would be totally unexpected and shocking without it being off-color or weird or just way too far out? And this is where agencies sometimes go wrong is they try to be like, well, it’s got to be this creative. It’s like, no, it’s just got to be something that you can somewhat rationalize. So he’s like, man, what if I just jump on a plane and I’m just going to spend all the money on plane tickets and I’ll film with a little camera my experience just living life? That’s just doing it. And I’m just going to deliver them this thing. Who cares what they say? They gave me the money, I got to decide it. It’s like look at this video, it has 31 million views. And it is such a great example of ‘growth hacking’ where he flipped the whole idea on his head. He flipped this experiment, he flipped the opportunity on his head and he said, “I have 25 grand, I’m not going to go into some studio, try to storyboard some ad.” He just did what felt creative.

Ben Grynol: And that’s I think the right way to always approach these things is how can we do something that is going to … And it’s not about creating some viral video or some piece of content that you cross your fingers and hope gets wide distribution. It’s like, how can we do something that is going to get us to achieve our goal? That might be you’re in the business of, I don’t know, you’re trying to engage high net worth people to have some service. And you’re like, you know what, they expect me to show up in a nice black Mercedes, I’m just going to have the Ferrari company. I’m going to spend my money picking up people in a Ferrari. I don’t know, making it up on the spot. But that ends up being the thing where they’re like, “I didn’t expect this.” And that’s how you hack these things together is you do all the unexpected things to create such deep engagement with people that you’re trying to target that they go, “I love this thing so much, how can I not be a part of it?”

Wiz Abdulla: Maybe the Wienermobile instead of a Ferrari.

Ben Grynol: Or why not the Dumb & Dumber car, the shaggin, what’s that thing called, it’s such a great car.

Wiz Abdulla: Shaggin wagon maybe.

Ben Grynol: Maybe, it’s such a terrible and great car at the same time.

Wiz Abdulla: I love the idea of thinking outside of the box. I mean, you know that I love to jam on crazy weirdo ideas, it’s a big part of what we do at Spacecadet. Tell me about your creative process at Levels. I mean, I know that you all have come up with some interesting marketing experiments that you’ve tested every time. And I think that maybe this is a block as well for some founders especially in the early days. Pre-seed, small team, your head is so full of all of the fires that you’re trying to put out that maybe it’s hard to take that space to think outside of the box and be creative or maybe it’s not a practice skill for you. How do you all approach it at Levels? I mean, I’m looking at your latest Levels marketing test spreadsheet, there’s a good dozen ideas in there. What’s the actual sausage factory nuts and bolts of how you generate these ideas at Levels? Is it just you sitting with a notepad, you’re getting together with the team? Tell me about that process.

Ben Grynol: Yeah. We’ve got a pretty wide culture of openness. So anyone and everyone can throw ideas into the, put them out, we use Threads. It’s sort of like email meets Slack, but people can put ideas into Threads and we’ll riff on them and run with them. And it’s not like we have some ideas channel, it’s just things happen pretty organically. There are definitely people on the team who spend more time thinking about reaching members through these pillars because that’s the nature of their job. So Haney, editorial director. Haney is pushing out content all day every day. He’s creating content, distributing it. His mind is always in that space. So he’s always going to have ideas of what if we did this. Sam, same thing like. Sam will say, do we have an, we call them ultimate guides. He might put a message in the content channel for Haney and say, “Hey, do we have the ultimate guide to … Yesterday, it happened to be fiber.

Ben Grynol: Haney was like, “Yeah, man, I’m working on this.” Because our ultimate guides do pretty well from a data perspective, they’ve got a lot of long-term engagement and people tend to reference them over time. So that’s a way that some of these ideas come about. But where a lot of them get generated from is they’re just always coming to whomever, and then people might have their own process of writing down things on a notepad or whatever it is. Sometimes they’ll just post them. And so Sam would say like, “Hey, I was thinking we should record content about our team just talking, being interviewed about asynchronous work or remote work or what it means to be scrappy, what it means to move with velocity. Should we do it?” And you start to have a conversation publicly visible within the team.

Ben Grynol: And that gets massaged over time. So we had a conversation about this exact thing, let’s say it was somewhere around May. Let’s record our culture at Levels. And sometimes those videos seem or that content can seem a little bit contrived, can seem inauthentic and just a little too salesy. So we thought, hey, let’s try it. We ran this experiment, did it with as low amount of time as possible. Everyone recorded looms of themselves independently and we stitched it together and we’re like, “It’s actually not bad. What does it look like if we do a better iteration?” And then we did that and then we did another one and another, and it keeps going. Now, this has actually become this thing which we call the culture documentation project. And it’s developing to this day into a set of tools or some content that we can share with other founders about the way we communicate as a team and give it the same caveat that we’re giving this conversation. Hey, this is not prescriptive advice, it just happens to be the way that we work. If there’s anything you can pull out of it, great.

Ben Grynol: But the goal is just create content about the way we work because we’re already doing this stuff. If it helps other founders be better in operating their companies or encourages other people to start companies, great, then that is a very good outcome for us. So these ideas don’t always come from sitting down and saying we’ve blocked off time in the calendar to have a brainstorming session, and we’re doing it synchronously. It’s just a lot of back to experimentation, it’s a lot of loose ideas. Sometimes they’re funny and out there and we think they’re so ridiculous, and then other times we refine them and we’re like, “It’s actually not that ridiculous to do whatever it is.” And it becomes the culture documentation project five months later.

Ben Grynol: That’s sort of the way we think about it, it’s just always iterating on what we’re doing. And the one takeaway from all of this is being super aware internally of project debt so that we don’t go, “Wow, now we have 27 projects on the go, how do we get to V2 or V3 of each of those projects?” Even if they were successful, we’re saying the opportunity cost of pursuing the next iteration of something that worked versus something new is too high, and they’re just direct trade-off. Let’s just retire the, even though we’re doing another book club as of yesterday, let’s retire the book club hypothetically. Let’s not do any more of that so that we can open up X amount of hours per week to try something totally out there. Riding hot air balloons around the world because that has made sense somehow.

Wiz Abdulla: I like that one. I’d be happy to come up board the air balloon as well.

Ben Grynol: Let’s do it.

Wiz Abdulla: Let’s talk a bit more about some of the weird experiments you’ve run just to give us an idea of the breadth of experiments. I think a big part of experimentation that you’ve touched on is being divergent and thinking outside of just maybe what’s first thing that comes to mind and being maybe a bit silly and fun with it as well just to help come up with ideas. I love all the company building content that you all have made, often shared with our early stage founders. Let’s talk about some of the more maybe tactical marketing and experiments that you’ve run just to give us a sense of the breadth of the experiments that you’re running there.

Ben Grynol: So let’s dive into the specific example, and this will be longer winded than the already long-winded responses I’ve been giving. Sam had this harebrained idea, this was February. He’s like, “Hey team, I think we should all drink glucose 75.” That’s that orange stuff that you drink to see what happens to your glucose Levels when you drink it and then they see did you produce enough insulin over X amount of time to come back down to normal Levels? A lot of times they’ll test for gestational diabetes in women who are pregnant or people who might be pre-diabetic. He’s like, “Let’s do this thing where we all drink this stuff and then just sit there. And then we’ll drink this again, and then we’ll do some physical activity right after we drink it.” And what we want to see is did our Levels come back down, did physical activity …

Ben Grynol: We can’t actually run lab experiments, but we can somewhat be lab mice ourselves. Can we run an experiment on ourself where anecdotally we could put out a blog post and be like, hey, physical activity from our N of 15 or N of 20 experiment has shown that on average your glucose Levels drop by whatever percent when having something with a high-glycemic index. When you spike your glucose Levels, does physical activity bring it back down? We’ll create a piece of content about that. It’ll be a cool research initiative. And so we did this, we drank this glucose 75. And people shut down. Sam, I think he had to record a podcast. I think we were doing it together, and he texted me, he’s like, “Man, I’m at 300 crashing really hard, I’m going hypoglycemic.” Tom had to lie down and take the afternoon off.

Ben Grynol: It was somewhat of a disaster, so we stopped this halfway through. And we were like, “Okay, team, stop doing this, this is not productive.” But let’s use something that has a deeper tie into people in the world and community. Let’s try this, and if it works, why don’t we just get the community to do it? So again, it’s going to be such a long story because there are so many components of how we got to this point of the takeaway of what is the weird experiment and what was the outcome? Experiments like digress for a sec, experiments don’t need to have some immediate outcome either, they’re just this iterative process where you don’t plan on the final outcome being the outcome that it is. But it leads to some new place, and it ends up maybe being a core part of a product feature or business model.

Ben Grynol: So back to the story, we ended up drinking Coke. We did an episode about this actually, so it’s the Coke challenge it’s called. We ended up drinking Coke, we did the exact same thing. We found internally that, hey, if you do physical activity, it does bring down your glucose Levels. Created a blog post about it, reached out to a core group of members and said, “Hey, do you want to participate in the first ever community challenge submission? We’re going to send you Coke.” We wanted to make sure that we were controlling for, it was nerdy, and it was so funny and cool, but we’re controlling for product. That being what factory did it come from, quantity, type? Because what we didn’t want to have happen is that somebody misinterpreted a 355 mil Coke for a two liter and then you’re like, well, of course the results are different.

Ben Grynol: So we sent everybody Coke, and they did it. They did this experiment, they felt engaged in it. A lot of people were posting UGC, and that was cool. The next step of it was totally unplanned, but it’s now become a core part of our team and the way we engage and the community. And so Josh when he was at SpaceX, every time they would do something meaningful like put a rocket into the air, Elon would give everybody on the team a patch, a space patch, they’re called mission patches. And they’re these coveted items that he has and all of his friends they have to this day, he’s like, “This is going to be passed down in my family forever, this is so meaningful.” A lot of them are framed. Sam and Josh were like, “Man, what if we make a mission patch for the Coke challenge? Totally unexpected, people have no idea it’s coming. We’re just going to make these embroidered things, and we’re going to send it to people and they can keep it. And that will be you start to collect them.”

Ben Grynol: And so we did it and sent them to people and they’re like, “Whoa, this is entirely cool.” Now, fast forward to today, we have this full stack of mission patches. This is unveiling the curtain a little bit, but that’s okay. We have a full stack of mission patches, they will be digital one day where you can get them in product and collect them, and that’s cool. Bot in the near term roadmap, but we’ve been riffing with some concepts around it. But we have mission patches for internal team members, so the year you joined and you get one every year that you’re part of the team. We have ones for community initiatives like these challenges. And we now have ones for anybody who is part of the cap table. So the cool thing is … There’s one coming to you, we just started the production part of it.

Ben Grynol: But the idea is that how cool is it when there are all these mission patches, this entire suite, maybe we’ve got 50 or 100 them in however many years. But nobody could actually collect all of them, and they’re somewhat coveted. So there is not a single person in the world who can rightfully collect the cap table that the internal team and all the community ones because there isn’t any overlap in that part of the Venn diagram. So it’s actually a very cool thing to see how people will start to covet these things once they realize, man, we’ve got these mission patches. So the whole long-winded story is what started out as a ridiculous idea for an internal experiment based on research has now turned into a community engagement. And more than just community, a Levels ecosystem, engagement project with these mission patches. It’s still early days with them, but they might be a core part of the product where people are like, “Man, I want mission patches.” It’s funny how experiments evolve.

Wiz Abdulla: I love that, and I’m excited to get my mission patches. I think something that’s interesting there calling back to your thoughts on project debt and making sure that you’re not overextending yourselves. When you approach these experiments that may still start as small idea, let’s go drink this crazy glucose 75 and see how high we all get, and then they can take on a life of their own and expand. How do you along the way make sure that you’ve got maybe metrics in place and are measuring to decide whether this is a good idea to continue down this path and keep expanding it and expanding it? Then also related to that, I’d be curious to understand how you all think about spending on marketing tasks. It sounds like this one with the Coke challenge probably pretty low lift. Curious to hear your perspective on both spending on these various tests and then thinking about measurement and metrics, especially as you start to expand it into something different than how it started.

Ben Grynol: Yeah. There are two things to highlight which come up again and again. Not everything that is measured matters and not everything that matters can be measured, that’s one of them. And the other one is what gets measured gets managed. So thinking about it this way. Too often, data is unbelievably important. Data is great when you are data informed but not data-driven. And it’s counterintuitive I think to sometimes what people say, oh, we have to be data-driven. It’s like, yes, use data, data is great. But the reason you should be data informed and not driven is data-driven implies that anytime you get data that says, hey, here is the outcome or here are the results. If you index on that, it will lead you to make decisions where you’re not using any of your own insight or intuition to say, “Well, that actually is bad data.”

Ben Grynol: And I use this example all the time. If I ask Penelope, my five-year-old, what do you want for breakfast? 10 times out of 10 she’s going to say chocolate or ice cream or some ridiculous thing. And so if I’m like, “Well, the data’s says, so it must be true, and that’s the right choice,” there is no discretion on my part to be like, “Man, you can’t eat that, that’s not very good for you.” So data informed is despite the data saying that, my discretion says we’re going against the data. Now, it’s important to measure certain things. And this gets back to not everything that is measured matters and not everything that matters can be measured.

Ben Grynol: Let’s say we put out that metabolical book club content and after a year it had very low views. So quantitatively it just didn’t land, and we really pushed it. We tried really hard to distribute it. And so we’re like, “No matter what we did this thing didn’t seem to land.” Tried to dissect why it is that it didn’t land, and maybe the data is telling us, man, don’t do that thing. Again, that’s not a good use of time and capital, assume we put money behind it. But let’s say quantitatively or qualitatively, sorry, it had 100 views but there were 100 comments on it as well. And it was all this opened my eyes to whatever it is, and this changed my perspective on something else. And we’re going, wow, qualitatively, this thing actually landed despite what the data says. It’s figuring out when to use the data and when to ignore it that is the really hard thing.

Ben Grynol: Getting into what gets measured gets managed. Sometimes if you anchor on, it’s typical with sales teams, you give them some target. Well, they’re just going to try to hit that target, and that can be a dangerous or a slippery slope because then they’re incentivized to do something that actually might not be beneficial or not be great for other teams within a startup or within a company. Well, we’re going to just push to hit our month end sales targets. Well, then that puts a whole bunch of stress on ops infrastructure. And it causes all these unsatisfied customers because you can’t distribute product or information or whatever it is quick enough, and then it’s actually worse off. So it’s figuring out what to measure and then managing against that if it is actually a good metric. JM on our team is notorious for saying, hey, we should be very conscious of ignoring vanity metrics. That is let’s say in impressions are a great vanity metric.

Ben Grynol: We spent all this money, we produced content, and then we spent money to actually distribute it through paid, let’s say. And it resulted in a million impressions, but there was no engagement, that being very few comments or very few actual likes. It was just we paid the Facebook engine to get it out wide. Well, that metric is going to tell you you did really good. And if you pat yourself on the back, you’re like, oh, it feels really good to look at that and go, we hit a million impressions in that. That’s what we were trying to do. And we were trying to do it with 10,000 bucks, and it only cost us 5. Making this up as we go. Look how good we did. But if you actually dissect it and you’re honest with yourself, you’re like, the only comments on here is how terrible the content was, and it’s not people trolling you. It’s actually they’re like, this was totally off color, this makes me think less of your brand, whatever.

Ben Grynol: And you’re ignoring the wrong metrics, that being the comments, that being the engagement, it’s just thumbs down. That’s why you have to be so careful about measuring. The next part of this is the capital part, so how to think about deploying capital. The capital part is important because capital can be deployed against whatever you want. And the heuristic I think for capital deployment when it comes to marketing is advertising. Hey, we have to advertise to get some return to engage people, to do whatever it is. We’ve done a lot of experimentation with podcasts. So Tom Griffin who’s head of partnerships had a ton of experience previously with Halo and ran this podcast, we call it podcast tour. It was first round piece coming out about it.

Ben Grynol: But he basically said, “Let’s get Josh and Casey on a ton of podcasts, over 100 podcasts over six months, and that will be our awareness play.” So that cost money because we had to work with an agency for placement because Tom couldn’t possibly run point. I mean, he did run point on most of it, but he couldn’t do outreach and engagement on every single one, especially with some of the tier one shows. It’s just so much harder because of the sales cycle. So he said, “I’ll figure out the playbook, that’s how we’re going to deploy capital.” So we did that, there you go. We spent money doing that, and the return is a ton of awareness, a ton of long term engagement, and a lot of perennial content.

Ben Grynol: So it’s not ephemeral, it’s not a clubhouse session or a tweet that just is promoted and goes away. It is there for a long time and people still reference it. So deploying N thousand dollars, let’s just say deploying 20 grand against a podcast strategy where you go how many impressions, how much engagement, how much listener attention, how much member attention did we capture? And did we create value for people by educating them about this thing that is our goal as a company? Versus we spent 20,000 bucks, and we got five million impressions running Facebook ads. Very different thought process, but it’s always backing up to how to deploy capital. It doesn’t need to be in ways of advertising, it just needs to be in ways of if you think that sending flowers to potential SaaS customers is going to help engage them, that’s actually not a bad use of 20 grand if you convert customers from it and you make them really happy and they’ve got long term value of 10 years as a customer. That’s an incredible return on investment.

Ben Grynol: So it’s just thinking about these back to growth hacking. It’s like, how do you spend capital the least amount possible or an appropriate amount to get some learning or some result and knowing that it doesn’t need to be done at scale initially, it can be we’ll try it as an N of one or N of two experiment and then scaling from there.

Wiz Abdulla: I think that a lot of these early stage companies that I work with, pre-seed, seed companies that maybe only raised a million, two million bucks or, I don’t know, reluctant to deploy capital into experiments in the early days. I think especially when they’re not seasoned on what true growth experiments could look like, it’s the idea that, hey, ads are pretty saturated. If I put $50,000 in, may turn into nothing, may only turn into $50,001. Some of these experiments that you’ve run Ben have returned 10,000 bucks for every dollar spent. I think that sometimes founders miss out that these experiments can be not only learning opportunities but can actually be pretty lucrative.

Wiz Abdulla: Sometimes you can find little weirdo edges that are like, wow, that worked out incredibly, and we just got $500,000 in new signups from that. Tell us about what that process has been for you. Obviously not all of them that successful, but it seems that maybe there is some learning for founder who are new to all this that, hey, experimentation can actually be good for the books as well, and you shouldn’t think about it just as money lost and burned.

Ben Grynol: Attribution is the funniest conversation to have because if you look for attribution before running an experiment or trying … Attribution prior to running or even post is just about rationalization. So all that happens is people are trying to rationalize before deploying the capital to be like, this will be successful, so prior to an experiment, this will be successful with a ROAS, Return On Ad Spend of let’s just say three to one. So of three, we get three times the return of the capital we deploy, that’s what’s going to make it successful. Post you measure it and you’re like, man, we only got two and a half. Well, trying to find that attribution … Let’s break it down one more layer, the way that you know attribution or you think you know is because you’ve worked with some affiliate and there is a slash Spacecadet link that you can track back and you’re like, “Okay, that’s how we know it worked.”

Ben Grynol: But it was only two and a half, three was our benchmark. Well, how do you know that that’s actually the outcome? And so what we do is we still measure that because it’s important for some things, but we don’t anchor on it. We measure it out of curiosity, we don’t anchor on it out of decision making because how the heck do you measure the impact of mission patches? How can we possibly say that … I mean, maybe we could rationalize the cost of sending books to everybody and all the time that we invested, which you should. People should also value their time more than the capital even, how much time are you investing not just the hard capital that you’re deploying. How do we look back and go like, man, we sent out all these books to people, it costs us this amount of money. How do we even know that that converted more people? It might not ever.

Ben Grynol: How do we know, let’s say that we all decided, okay, we’re pretty sure this wouldn’t convert anyone new, but maybe it helped people become long term subscribers for one more month. Let’s do the math on that and let’s figure out if it actually worked. It’s just such a terrible idea because that’s not the goal. How do you look back and go the mission patch created this much value. You absolutely can’t. So what you do is you go intuitively people are more engaged, we can tell because there’s more content floating around. That content back to the beginning of this whole conversation, the flywheel, that content created more awareness and more engagement and led more people to have conversations with other people in the world about what is the metabolic health crisis, what is Levels? And maybe they converted, maybe they didn’t.

Ben Grynol: But if this mission patch got people to talk to other people about, man, I probably wouldn’t dive into that piece of Wonder Bread, let’s dunk on Wonder Bread. I probably wouldn’t be slamming Wonder Bread every morning, that’s not gonna be super good for your long term health. Then, yay, mission patch is deploy more capital against that because that is what we’re doing. And I’m being very hyperbolic about it because we’re not looking for attribution on that. We’re not trying to measure convergence because enough people having those conversations over time leads to more conversions. Back to the whole thing of this is not a prescriptive playbook, and there are different approaches for SaaS versus enterprise versus consumer. But that’s the way we think about it is deploy capital without always trying to say what is our exact attribution.

Ben Grynol: And let’s use the word waste, you really start wasting your time. You’re no longer investing it, you’re wasting your time. Every 15-minute increment you spend each week, you’re wasting your time trying to measure things that don’t act actually make a difference. Who cares if you found some linear path to the number of conversions that mission patch has created? That’s not going to influence your decision making moving forward on what is the right thing to do based on your mission.

Wiz Abdulla: I like that. Let’s start to maybe wind down and bring it back to the flywheel. Something that I get asked often by again, early stage founders pre-seed and seed is when they should start to think about building out a growth team. I think that you guys probably started a bit earlier than others that I’ve seen, and it is because primarily you had more resources and we’re off to a great start already. What’s your thinking on when a very early stage company should start to build out a growth function? When does it make sense to start to make that first hire?

Ben Grynol: It depends on what is growth within the organization. Ironically, there was a first round piece that came out yesterday about exactly this. And it was talking about all these different stories of how growth at one company was somebody who was really good at communications. And I can’t remember what the company was or why, but they needed somebody who was really good at comms and PR to get their message out there. So that person was very much a generalist. That role of growth worked for them, whereas another company might need somebody who’s really good at paid search and SEO or paid digital, we’ll say paid performance on social. Not just social, but we’ll consider Reddit is social, paid performance on digital platforms. That’s a thing. Or growth might be somebody who is a good community lead, good community person with community engagement.

Ben Grynol: And so I think the best way of thinking about growth is figure out what it is that you need and hire a generalist against that, somebody who’s deep enough in something but broad enough in enough aspects of growth that they can get into the weeds and do the work that needs to be done. And know everyone’s going to have different skillsets. So if somebody is really good at engaging community but they’ve got limited experience in performance, that’s okay, that’s entirely okay. You don’t need somebody who has done all different aspects of growth to be providing value, you just need somebody who’s helping to start that flywheel, whatever that might be. If it’s comms and outreach for PR because you’re dealing with, I don’t know, something related to public sector and enterprise and it’s a really hard vertical to break into or that is the avenue to break into it, that might be effective.

Ben Grynol: Let’s make an assumption, the immediate team, the founding team, it’s small, it’s three to five people and mostly technical product or technical background. And they’re like, okay, I’m not sure where to start with growth or I’ve sort of hit my wall on growth. That’s where you can start to think who is somebody with a generalist background, whether it’s sales, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s go into all of these gamuts of growth, somebody who’s going to help us achieve the goal based on the product that we’re building? That’s the best way of thinking about it. And if all you want to do is run performance ads and you think that’s the approach to growth, you probably don’t need somebody who is going to come in just to do that within the organization, you can outsource that quite easily.

Ben Grynol: But if you want somebody who’s full stack and has a wider lens on coming up with experiments and being able to run against that, even if they’re deeper in comms or community or really good with brand marketing, anything related to just doing organic social stuff, great. But just for figure out who that is and don’t mistake one role for another. Don’t bring in somebody who is really good at brand marketing on social if you’re an enterprise company. To be blunt about it, it’s like nobody’s going to follow your Instagram account and Twitter account and really care about what you’re saying until you’re doing something meaningful. And even when you are, I’ll speak out of terms because I don’t know off the top of my head the engagement, but people aren’t following Salesforce and being like, “Man, I really want to engage with Salesforce on Twitter.”

Ben Grynol: I mean they are, but it’s like that is not the, if you’re building the next version of Salesforce, it’s like that’s not how you’re getting the flywheel. That’s not how Slack even though Slack, B2B SaaS. Slack didn’t get this flywheel going by bringing in a brand marketer and being like, “We’re just gonna start posting Instagram shots.” That’s not what they were doing. Their growth flywheel came from bottoms up engaging devs, devs adopted the tool. It was very much like a sales community driven sales flywheel of get a bunch of people using the product bottoms up, and then there you go. That is their growth. So think about what type of growth you need and then go hard against that.

Wiz Abdulla: And I think the million dollar question for you there is any tips on where to look for these generalist growth unicorns who can help you find which specific areas you need to lean in into and be okay at most of them?

Ben Grynol: Yeah. This is actually a misconception, big hat tip to Campbell Baron. So Campbell Baron, side note, friend of Levels, personal friend. Young guy from Toronto, he just turned 18, content creator, TikToker, has a podcast. There are all these Campbell Barons all over Twitter, all over the world, all over the Acquired Slack community, they’re just everywhere. There are a lot of people who are early in their career that they’ve grown up in a digital world and they might not have experience in performance. They just haven’t deployed 10 or 20 or 50 million marketing budgets, and they haven’t spent years learning paid search. Maybe they have, but in general they haven’t. But they’ve grown up in this digital world where they generally understand what it means to be part of a community or what it means to create content on digital platforms, what it means to engage with people.

Ben Grynol: And if they’ve got enough … Assume somebody’s on Twitter, and this doesn’t mean they’re great. But just assume somebody’s on Twitter and they engage with people. They get what it means to reach out to people and to participate in a conversation. Well, the takeaway is that these growth generalists even if they’re junior, and you’re thinking about how do we afford somebody or how do we bring in somebody with a limited … We’ve got limited capital to grow our team and limited capital to spend money, it’s like you can find all these people that might not have 10 or 15 years of experience or more but they’re actually really good at just figuring things out. And you bring them in to get enough traction to start running experiments. These roles are everywhere if you give people the chance.

Ben Grynol: And the problem is that too many people are tricked by signaling. Well, that person does doesn’t have credentials, they haven’t worked at one of the big tech companies or they haven’t worked at a meaningful startup before. And it’s like, just look at the content they put out, look at what they do. And if they’ve created side projects on their own through indie hackers or through some community, they’re smart enough to build things independently. Give them the chance, reach out to them, start working with them on a contract basis. And the reason I bring this to Campbell is, A, he’s just an incredible executor and a great friend. But B, we outsourced this entire culture project that we’re talking about before, one of those harebrained Sam ideas that is an amazing project for our company and team, he executed it all.

Ben Grynol: We just popped him a text and we were like, “Hey Campbell, can you do this thing for us full on contractor.” But that is helping us to get that growth flywheel going. And now we’ve got enough of this thing to go like, man, people actually want this startup content from us, it’s not just this health related content. So the takeaway is give people the opportunity to prove themselves. And it’s a lot easier to find them than you think if you pay attention on the right platforms that is within the demand curve Slack community, within the Acquired Slack community, within different Discords within Twitter. Find people, listen to podcasts that they do. You’ll be surprised how many people can help you contribute. And you don’t have to commit to them. It’s not like, okay, we got to bring this person on board, just give them the opportunity to take a project on and see what they do with it. And then that sometimes leads to a role.

Wiz Abdulla: I love that Ben. Maybe final go question just to end things on here. You’ve mentioned some pretty good resources throughout the podcast, Seth Godin, First Round’s blog, Acquired Slack channel, just now Demand Curve. Are there any other great resources that have been helpful for you that people should be checking out?

Ben Grynol: Like growth related ones? What’s the daily? Is that the question?

Wiz Abdulla: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ben Grynol: So there’s two parts to it. One, if you want to learn, you have to learn from direct resources. That being if you want to learn about networks and ecosystems and whatever it is, you have to read about that topic. You have to get some foundation of knowledge. So there are great books, let’s use some of my favorite books. One of my favorite ones ever is Drive by Dan Pink. Has nothing to do with growth, it has more to do with understanding people and psychology and the way that they actually behave. But it relates to growth because you’re like, what are people going to do if you give them autonomy, mastery, and purpose internally or externally? That’s a good mental model to use for … It ties back into growth.

Ben Grynol: It’s a bit macro not as micro as far as learning about paid ads on social. But the takeaway is that listen to a ton of podcasts that are unrelated, read a ton of books that are unrelated, watch a ton of documentaries that are unrelated. This is what works. Again, this is my approach, it doesn’t mean it works for everyone. But just start to read about grasshoppers, old steam engines and hydrangeas. Because then the next morning you’re going to go, oh yeah, mission patches, of course. Because there was something that you read in grasshoppers, steam engines and hydrangeas that made you go like, there you go, connect the dots, mission patches is what’s going to work. Again, being very hyperbolic about it, but that is the best thing is to expose yourself to so much unrelated information that your brain starts connecting really obscure dots to build these new neural pathways and to be more creative in approach.

Ben Grynol: If you want to learn about specifically growth or marketing to things or just business related startup stuff, Acquired is a killer podcast. Seth Godin, all of his books are great. Could go on and on, but just anything related to business startups. Dive as deep as you can, engage with people on Twitter, learn where you can. If you don’t know something like you don’t know what an NFT is, who cares, that’s not a bad thing. Command N, NFT and check out what Wikipedia says and just learn what it is. And if you actually are interested in it, you might go down a rabbit hole of going on open sea and maybe exploring what this is. Try to understand what it is and why it’s important.

Ben Grynol: And hat tip to Gary V., he does a really good job at always exposing people to what is going on from a frontier perspective. So watch his content and listen to it because it will open your eyes to a new world to understand whether or not you like, let’s just use NFTs, whether or not you like them, believe in them, doesn’t matter. And maybe it doesn’t relate to what you’re doing, so who cares? Don’t feel that you need to understand everything about every single thing in the world. But if it’s somewhat ties into what you do and you don’t understand it, just take a little bit of time to think through why might this be valuable? Or if you don’t believe it’s valuable, form a POV on it and just have some position because you understand what it is and how it works. So I think that’s always the approach is constant immersion in weird and unrelated things in the world, experiences, content, and connecting all of these dots to come to the conclusion that mission patches are the way to go.

Wiz Abdulla: I will be reading about grasshoppers and hydrangeas tonight.

Ben Grynol: I think the misconception with podcasting is a lot of people don’t start because they’re like, well, I need something interesting to talk about. And it’s remove that if you and your friend want to go on and talk about old cars and 20 people listen, but it’s a chance for you and your friend to connect, great. If it turns into something, cool, but you don’t need the permission. Too many people wait for permission to be like, “I need the permission from other people, the acknowledgement that this is good before I start doing it.” It’s like, no, just start doing it. You know what I mean? A different way of looking at it. It’s no different than art. Should somebody be a good artist to start painting? If I said to you, “Hey, Wiz I really want to start painting.” And you’re like, “Yo man, don’t do that unless you’re going to be able to sell that thing for 1,000 bucks, it’s a waste of your time.”

Ben Grynol: That would be so deflating, it would be discouraging. And I think people feel that about video and audio media, whereas their normal and the right answer is, man, who cares? You don’t know anything about painting, try it out. Do to Michael’s, buy a couple canvases, strokes and brushes. And if it feels good and you it, keep doing it.

Wiz Abdulla: Turn into an NFT and put it on Coinbase’s new marketplace.

Ben Grynol: And that is exactly how you get onto OpenSea.