Paid Marketing Can Be a Better Place to Be

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Nimsan: There's an important place paid marketing. It's fast to get off the ground. Am if it becomes your primary channel, it's a very hard thing to sustain,. Ah, but also because it degrades pretty quickly, actually. Nimsan: I think of your thinking about paid marketing more as an accelerate a rather than the growth strategy.

Dan Hockenmaier is the founder of the growth strategy firm Basis One. Prior to Basis One he was the Director of Growth Marketing at Thumbtack. You can learn more at BasisOne.com.

Gustaf Alströmer is a Partner at YC. Prior to YC he was the Product Lead for Growth at Airbnb.

You can find Dan on Twitter @danhockenmaier and Gustaf is @gustaf.

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.

Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

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Topics

00:00 - Intro

00:50 - Dan's most unpopular advice

1:45 - What growth strategies do people jump on too soon?

2:20 - Questions Dan asks a company he's advising

3:50 - Traits Dan looks for in early growth hires

6:30 - How product and growth are tied together

11:30 - Good/bad learnings from Facebook's growth team

14:00 - A/B testing

17:00 - Retention and other metrics

20:45 - The importance of experimentation

23:45 - Getting ideas for A/B tests then choosing which to do

25:00 - Advice for employees who want to get a growth program going

29:00 - B2B vs consumer growth tactics

34:00 - Pricing experiments

35:30 - Paid marketing

39:30 - Launching in new markets

40:15 - Hiring for marketing

43:45 - Metrics for marketing hires

45:45 - Toni asks - Why did Airbnb grow so fast?

48:45 - Step function growth changes for companies that already had scale

49:55 - Michael Savage asks - It would be great to discuss growth into new regions for example Africa and UAE. What would their approach be, how does it differ from region to region, culture to culture?

52:30 - Justin LaRosa asks - What are some of the most common drivers of viral growth?

55:20 - Hiring a growth agency vs building your own team

58:20 - How do you think about growth in the context of improving humanity?