Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman

"I believe ChatGPT is the fastest growing product in history. Does that resonate? It does. Not that I can take credit for it. We'll talk about that. Either way, nice job."

""They're asking about, you know, how do you compare to X competitor and Y competitor? And why does it cost so much and et cetera, et cetera. That probably means that there's more to be done in the product market fit zone rather than throwing in more at the top of the funnel because you have a leaky funnel at the bottom. And so hiring a demand generator, maybe the worst thing that you can do versus thinking about more of a product marketer who's thinking about the competitive differentiation, the positioning, the sales enablement that gets more people through at the bottom.""

""So, I mean, you got diagnose D, analyze A, take a different path T and experiment for the E. So it's the DATE framework. I just coined it.""

""Being cheaper is a race to the bottom, especially when you think about sort of scaling laws and how things are playing out. Every company is sort of becoming an AI company at this time. And so as models get cheaper, more capable, being cheaper is not going to be the thing that really is a durable approach in the market. I think in terms of doing things differently, it's not just for the sake of it. I think it's really that novelty and that differentiation is something that people are craving for. They're not looking for yet another tool in the market. They are looking for something that aligns with their values, aligns with what their goals are.""

""Retool was very different from both my experiences at Stripe and at OpenAI because both Stripe and OpenAI, for better or for worse, were inbound companies, right? There was so much latent demand that we were fighting off people breaking down the door trying to get to our products. With Retool, marketing was between the company and revenue, and we had a fantastic product market fit with the enterprise space, with the developer community. But awareness was a challenge. And so how do we go out, not just like wait inside of our house, waiting for people to knock down the door, but rather step outside of our house and start introducing ourselves to the neighborhood? So thinking about outbound channels and building demand engines was the name of the game.""

""A lot of marketing metrics, again, tend to be vanity metrics. They tend to be about the number of clicks that you got, number of views that a tweet got, number of impressions. I think those are all bullshit numbers. Like really what you want to be looking at is your impact on either signups, if you're a self-serve product, PLG, or in terms of a B2B company, sales leads and revenue that you're driving, pipeline and opportunity that you're driving.""

"Everyone knew of ChatGPT. But when you clicked one Zoom level further, the thing that came up was, 'I don't know what to use it for.' Like I don't know what it replaces. Like should I be using search for this? Should I be using ChatGPT for this? Or how can it even help me?"

"And especially in hyper-growth companies, I think you have to run that diagnostic every three months, every six months in order to stay adaptable and flexible because those top-level goals do change. At some point, we really have to figure out how to scale our sales function. We have to figure out how to scale internationally. And so being adaptable to that meant constant reprioritization and making sure that you were also hiring people who weren't super deep in particular disciplines, but having a team structure that was T-shaped, people who could be flexible to those needs at the company."

"And so I think that skepticism means that you just have a higher bar for the quality of the content, the substance of the content. You want to make sure that the marketing is as substantive and as crafted as the product experience itself."

"When you came into Stripe, you looked at all of the biggest customer support issues and you turn those into docs to help people serve themselves. This was a great practice that existed at Stripe even before I joined, which is all new hires would do a support rotation just to build empathy with our customers. So users first was a very core operating principle for the company. And we spent about 20% of our time collectively talking to customers, talking to users, talking to non-users to understand their needs, their gripes about the product."

"Marketing is an extension of your product. It's the first touchpoint your customers have with your product. And ideally, you're setting expectations there in terms of what they should expect once they sign up for the product or commit to a contract and start using it within their companies."

"I think you have to be very diagnostic in terms of what can marketing be doing to help rather than just going off of the typical top of funnel and then middle of funnel and conversion oriented tactics that end up being a playbook."

"There's almost this unspoken element of what you're describing that I want to dig into a little bit, which is the need and value of having consistent and high quality marketing, communication. Why is that important? There's always this talk of just like move fast, break things, we're going to be scrappy, we're not going to be obsessed with like perfect quality of our, I don't know, websites and emails. Just like, why is that important? Why do you value that? Why should companies maybe value that more?"

""So OpenAI had been around for almost a decade as primarily a research organization. They had launched ChatGPT about a year before I joined. And so that was the first foray into saying, hey, our work is not just announcing research breakthroughs. It is about putting products into the market.""

"A lot of marketing metrics tend to be vanity metrics about the number of clicks that you got, number of views, number of impressions. I think those are all bullshit numbers. What is that experience that you want your customers to come away with when they interact with your brand?"