This is a hit piece on Lenny’s latest podcast–Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer. Because while stuff like this is great for getting podcast listeners, it’s poison to early stage founders.

What founders need

The only thing an early stage founder truly needs is to find PMF. That is what the early stage is all about. You want to figure out a product that some market actually wants, whether that’s conference goers who want to sleep on sofas (airbnb), or people who want to buy books online (amazon). That is all.

If you are one of the lucky few, you will find a market where 25+% month-over-month growth is possible, where there is pull from the market for your solution. This is the initial goal.

The problem I have with these giant brand name advice-givers is that they had such insane PMF that the marketing really didn’t matter. They could have named their company something truly idiotic–like “Applovin”-and been successful.

Applovin, a useful example

Applovin started around when Drawbridge started. The founders were repeat founders and had been in ad tech before, some in sales. Drawbridge was 100% technical–100% engineers, not even a PM–and I was the first sales and BD guy. While I had sold ads, I was more of a jack-of-all-trades sales and BD guy. This was the fourth time I’d be going from 0-1.

We were out in the wilderness, with a brilliant idea.

We both struck gold. The difference was they couldn’t raise money, because their pitch was pretty boring (we’ll sell mobile ads to retain and re-acquire users). We raised from Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital because we were doing “cross-device” which sounded pretty amazing. And it was–the combination of vision and investors was why I joined.

Early on, we were selling the same thing–app installs. AppLovin performed incredibly well. So did we, but they were better. The market was big enough, there were times we grew 50% week over week.

We spent our engineering time focused on getting our cross-device ads to work better, even though it was clear our customers wanted even better performing ads. Which we could do–but, for reasons above my pay grade (at the time)–we chose not to invest in. There was a vision to pursue–one that it was increasingly clear to me wasn’t important to our customers. The customers who cared (large brands) were clearly years from investing meaningfully in mobile.

Applovin, not having a board or investors or some grand vision, just continued to execute. The very smart marketer they had tried her best–among other things, to argue for a rebrand–but it didn’t matter. They had found the bottled lightning. And they didn’t screw it up.

Drawbridge exited–for low-9-figures–and that was nice. Applovin, last I checked, was worth over $100bn. I did some math: good news for you, if I had had 1% of Applovin, you wouldn’t have this newsletter to read. I’d be on a yacht somewhere, figuring out whether it was better to use my helicopter or the zodiac to get my mountain bike to shore so I can get some miles in every day.

Why Stripe succeeded

I wanted to be an early Stripe customer, but failed at convincing my CEO at the time to take a chance on the startup. Why I didn’t quit and go work there, I still wonder (the thought literally never crossed my mind).

I was at TripIt and was negotiating our credit card processing agreement. At the time, that was how you processed credit cards on the internet: you did a deal with a legacy financial institution, negotiating basis points and signing a ~70 page long processing agreement. Then you used their godawful APIs that generally totally sucked and were shockingly poorly documented. You also had to jump through a lot of bureaucratic hoops to prove that you were real people, running a real business, etc. It even involved producing forecasts–for, in our case, a product that we hadn’t launched yet. Absurd.

Stripe let anyone process payments over the internet, with simple and well documented APIs, at about 30-40% lower cost.

Marketing was somewhat unnecessary. One post on HackerNews and it was off to the races.

If you are running marketing at a highly successful company

First off, congrats. It was probably a very difficult job to get, and you did it. The reality however is that the main job is not to screw it up. You don’t have to skate to where the puck will be–take chances on things that are new. You can just execute really, really well on what’s already proven to work. Whether that’s PLG, or TV ads, or Outdoor (god forbid) you can do whatever. A $100k or even $10mm mistake probably won’t matter. At all. Except, possibly, to your career.

If this is your situation, then by all means read what OpenAI and Stripe are doing. This is valualbe stuff–and you should probably be trying some of it. It sounds very good in a meeting to say, “I heard Stripe has had a lot of success with X, so we’re going to experiment with it.” That is how one successfully custodians a brand, or so I’ve heard.

If you are running marketing at a startup

If you’re running marketing at a startup, your goals are completely different. First off, your company may not be around in 18-24 months. Statistically that’s the more likely scenario. Every dollar of your pathetic budget has to be spent to maximum effect. Your competitors have already crowded the channels that provably work, so you have to invent some new way of reaching the same customers on turf where you have some advantage.

The only good news is you don’t need to reach nearly as many as those later stage, highly successful companies. Where they might need thousands of leads (or more) per month to feed their global sales teams, you might be happy with 20 or 30.

The one strategy that always works

Because 20-30 is a very achievable goal, you can dial back the crazy experiments and focus on simply reaching out to people. Email, LinkedIn–don’t believe the haters. It still works. A conference that nets you 40 new leads can be a great investment.

Do you need a “newsletter strategy”? Perhaps it would help, but unless you already have a newsletter, that’s likely not the best place to start.

Will being a LinkedIn influencer work? Maybe it will. Depends on your target audience–the influencers you see in your feed who are the most successful are probably selling to people just like you. Is your ICP also haunting LinkedIn on the daily? It really depends. If they are a factory manager–I can promise you, they are not. Email is your best bet.

What about cold calling? I wrote a piece about that a while ago. Recently I talked to a company that gets 80% of their leads from cold calling. Wait, what? And they sell to founders! I was skeptical, so I asked some questions.

They have 25 people making cold calls. Each person does between 120 and 1,000 (yes, one thousand) calls per day. The average is around 400. These are US-based people in a low-cost state. I’m sure they are loving their lives and are thrilled to come to work every day. They are calling 10 people at a time, using a combination of tools that auto-dial and then leave voicemails if there’s no answer; if there is an answer, the human connects and tries to get a meeting.

I did some math. I can’t see how this costs less than $100k/mo in salaries, and probably closer to $200k-300k with software, recruiting (employee churn has to be a thing) and bonuses (I mean, what would it take to motivate most people to harass hundreds of people every day?).

In other words, there’s no way cold calling is going to be the strategy you try first. Not to mention, they have a database of 200,000 companies–so it’s also a volume game.