Tim Doyle, co-founder of seed-stage company Eucalyptus, has spent $35M across political campaigns, mattresses and now healthcare. Before Eucalyptus, Tim was the Head of Marketing at Koala.

In this conversation, Tim talks about how he allocates capital, how Eucalyptus captures attention, where to extract value where others can’t see and how to acquire customers.

Later on in this episode, you’ll hear from Nick Crocker, General Partner at Blackbird Ventures. He was one of the very first believers in Eucalyptus and he’ll provide an investors lens on what others can learn from Eucalyptus.

Key topics covered:

The problem with Direct to Consumer companies.
The importance of GTM focus in an Australian context.
Ways you can allocate capital as a non technical founder.
How to unlock talent in your organisation.
Why you should spend 10% of your monthly marketing spend on testing.
The biggest fundamental shift in customer acquisition, advertising and branding in the last decade.

The best of Tim Doyle:

“In Australia, there aren’t a huge number of Venture back-able consumer product opportunities, there’s just not that many billion dollar product opportunities, but there's a lot of 50 to 100 million dollar ones that more or less exist on the same infrastructure.”
“What’s the actual thing you’re going to earn the right to exist on to begin with and how are you going to talk about that? If you can’t do that, you’ll never even get in. Do something dumb and focused and deliver on it really well, build your business around that and earn the right to do other stuff.”
“Price the externalities of a staff member to understand their true value.”
“The shorter the distance between your junior dev. and the customer the better the decisions that junior developer will make.”
“The gap between designer and customer is as short as possible.”
“Branding is iterative.”
“In a world where feedback is so real, fast and clear, sitting around and psychoanalysing your customers and thinking about what the best piece of creative for them is, is a complete waste of time. You may as well just increase the speed at which you test and then back the winners extremely hard and trust the iterative system that you’ve built to continue to learn and get better at acquiring customers over time.”
“A media model is constantly hungry.”
“You’re always value investing. Every decision you make is, ‘Can I extract more value out of this than I have to pay for it?’ It's super true in media buying. TV /Advertising companies don’t understand the price of their own inventory because they negotiate over lunch. If you have a better system for deriving value than they have, then you can extract the value they can’t see.”

Nick Crocker on Tim Doyle

“Tim was the best marketer and marketing thinker that I’d met in the time I had been investing.”
“Eucalyptus is an anomaly in that they did everything they said they would and that's rare.”
“The thing that I always felt with Tim, and that I know that Niki felt the first time he met Tim, was that he was an original thinker. And there is very little original thought in the world, period.”
“When you learn something new, really new and unique from someone, it's just a magical moment in this job.”

079 - How to survive a recession