The Challenge With the PLG Model

Amrita Mathur is VP Marketing at Superside. Superside is a B2B SaaS company that provides a design subscription service for marketing and creative teams. We talk about how Superside went from $0 to $30M ARR in three years, marketing strategy, when to exploit vs. when to explore, marketing team structure, where to find efficiencies in marketing, how constraints can act as foundations for your entire go-to-market effort, the cost of missing out, making smarter marketing bets and more.

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00:00.58
dgmg
Ah, will you tell me your name and tell me what you had for breakfast today.

00:04.48
Amrita
Oh my gosh. This is how you start on your podcast I had a little bit of Chi and that's it. That's I'm not a breakfast person to be honest.

00:16.73
dgmg
I go back and forth sometimes I am and then sometimes I think it is nice to kind of let it ride until 11 or or 12 I don't but but then sometimes I wake up and I'm like hungry and I gotta eat right now.

00:27.85
Amrita
Yeah, no I get it the whole intermittent fasting thing. You know people are talking about it these days like a lot and I'm just like but I've literally been doing that my whole life like I just don't eat until like noon or one that's just how.

00:41.35
dgmg
Yeah, it's it's funny how that happens like a trend happens and then people are like wait. This is a trend I've just been doing this thing my my whole life I did I I did it more just like out of convenience like ah like ah I just found when I was living in Boston and like going into the office and.

00:46.54
Amrita
Yes.

00:58.10
dgmg
Process of just like having to get breakfast every morning and I think a lot of there's a lot of like health nutritional advice that' like you got to eat breakfast. You got to eat breakfast. But I think you can get the same amount of meals and just later in the day and then you don't have it. It is a little bit freeing and I have your whole schedule be structured around like I got to eat or I'm going to pass out right now.

01:13.36
Amrita
Yeah, yeah, and then and the newest is that not only do you got to eat breakfast but you have to get thirty grams of protein just just sizable. That's like a burger patty kind of right I think thirty grams and it's like I don't think I can eat that you know if I can have half a banana that's pretty good.

01:21.41
dgmg
Um, right? yeah.

01:31.60
dgmg
Yeah, right, We're not all ah like Hollywood celebrities with with private chefs. You know it's like you got to have you got to have convenience. Okay, so see no what happens is when you ask somebody that then you you start in a normal conversation and it's.

01:36.62
Amrita
Um, I think we doubt yeah.

01:43.76
Amrita
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:46.56
dgmg
I Know you'd be a good guess anyway though because I've heard you I've heard you talk before. So um, let's just start with just tell people your name and background so they can get context for your for your voice and maybe describe what you what you do at superside and and and what superside is.

01:59.56
Amrita
Yeah, for sure. So my name is am Rita Mather I work for a company called superside which is very cool like innovative and disruptive in some ways you know we're tackling an age-old problem which is how the heck do you get good creative done good design done and. The answer is that there's many many different ways and there's many different models and constructs for for doing that and our approach has been to say hey you could be an Amazon you could be a meta you could be a ubs or a Morgan Stanley or whatever and maybe you have this huge gigantic, super powerful internal team.

02:24.64
dgmg
So.

02:38.56
Amrita
That can crank out this amazing stuff. Maybe you use a bit of AiEtc but there's still going to be times where you need added capacity and maybe that is a permanent state that you live in because your marketing team and your go-to-market teams are actually always ahead of the curve. And they're always pushing the boundaries. So it's kind of impossible for the creative team to like fully catch up so you're always going to be in this like state of flux where you're just like holy shit I need more and I need better and I need faster right? and it's like think about how we even do like Facebook ads these days like you need like 57 versions of the same thing to properly test it and. You need that in two days and then by the way the experiment data just came back and now you need to change your whole approach and that whole cycle the the test and learn cycle. That's so part. A big part of marketing now is complicated and design and creative teams just need to find a way to like catch up. So that's that's ultimately the.

03:22.64
dgmg
Earth.

03:30.90
dgmg
Yeah, well, it's interesting. It's it's like um, you you run this for a while in my job at drift I I ran the creative team and that was like I had no idea what I was doing and ah while I was good at the creative part like.

03:31.91
Amrita
Of.

03:36.58
Amrita
Thanks.

03:44.41
Amrita
Um.

03:44.74
dgmg
It was fun to come up with the ideas and come up with campaigns but you know I I noticed really quickly that you kind of keep bumping into the same problem which is like the answer is always yes we can do that. But that means we got to take this other thing off, it's such a game of.. It's very similar to like engineering and like prioritizing different things and it's hard and I ended up building so much empathy for the creatives at drift For example, on that on that team because you know they don't often know the needs of the business or like who which internal you know.

04:02.90
Amrita
Yeah.

04:19.95
dgmg
Relationship between this vp and that vp is like why you need to actually prioritize this page There's just so much nuance and like what's going on and they're like look I just want to create stuff so but but I can't because there's a limited number of hour...