Marketing is not an engineering function
If it was, we'd have a lot more unicorns than we do right now
Early last year, I interviewed at a startup that turned me down.
It was only the second time in my life that this had happened, and the first time was at university placements.
I was disappointed, as we all are when something like this happens. Before you read on, I want to state that I absolutely would have joined them if they had made me an offer. This is a very successful, well-backed startup, with super-smart founders, a great product, and a clear philosophy. But something one of the founders had during the conversation had made me wary, and I had immediately challenged it too.
Marketing was an engineering function, he said, and if SaaS startups did a specified number of things, they would be successful. And that’s what they needed me to do.
I disagreed.
This was true in the 2010s, I said, but it is not true anymore.
The old playbook exists, and can still give you a headstart, but that’s all it can give you. If you are looking for meaningful, long-term differentiation, and a brand that helps you acquire customers, thinking of marketing as engineering can only take you so far.
This was my contention, that they needed to focus on two core things first: the strategic narrative and the positioning, in that order. How could marketing take a stand or scale without getting this cleared up?
As I said, though, they turned me down.
In this last year, this startup has really figured out their marketing, put together a great team, and are well on their way to success.
However, they are still not as well known as they should be, and don’t have an immediately recognisable brand and backstory that can help them grow, even within the Indian ecosystem.
I hang the blame for this kind of thinking squarely on the growth-hacking philosophy that seems to have pervaded every part of startup land. What this philosophy (and way of operating) states that everything has a shortcut, if only you look for it. A growth-hack can be anything that drives growth, usually measured by one particular metric. So, the philosophy states, do what needs to be done to get that number to where it needs to be, and your job is done.
Please note that I’m not gunning for actual growth professionals, who actually look at product and marketing levers that can accelerate distribution, acquisition, or retention, and systematically help build these. I’m talking about a particular kind of belief that posits that if only you do some A/B testing, and fiddle with a CTA here and change a colour there, acquisition will shoot up. Engineer-founders tend to be particularly vulnerable to this kind of mumbo-jumbo because it appeals to their binary way of thinking. Zero and one. Right and wrong. Left and right.
The problem is that the world doesn’t work that way.
Lars Lofgren is one of the original growth professionals. He is the CEO of QuickSprout, and was the director of growth at KISSmetrics. In a long essay published in CXL last September, Lofgren wrote about why he would not be building growth teams again.
I’m going to quote him for a while now, and my point here is not to diss growth teams. It is to show how even a hardened, experienced growth professional still swears by the basics of marketing.
Over to Lofgren:
On the importance of positioning
I now believe that ‘good enough’ positioning pushed consistently across the whole company will make more of an impact on company growth than ‘perfect’ positioning used inconsistently across marketing assets. Markets absorb messages only if they’re delivered extremely consistently.
For anyone in a senior marketing role, you should absolutely audit your positioning. There are almost always gaps, and it’s the single most important variable that applies to all your marketing assets.
On why growth teams can’t switch contexts, and why that’s a problem
I trained my growth teams to optimise funnels and run A/B tests. When that wasn’t a priority anymore—and I needed top-of-funnel growth—those same teams were completely unprepared to solve a different problem. We went back to the bottom of the learning curve.
On why marketing channels and teams still beat growth teams
A properly scaled marketing channel can 10X your business. Best case for a growth team that optimises your funnel? 3X. I’d rather spend my time on a 10X strategy than a 3X one.
If a million dollars is a rounding error in your budget, go for it (building a growth team). Otherwise, consider using those marketing dollars to scale up your core distribution channel first. I’d rather spend that money and time building a marketing team that can continue to grow my business for years to come.
So where are the startups that have engineered marketing, growth-hacked their way to millions in ARR?
A few days ago, there was a thread on this on Twitter, which I scoured through to find some examples of actual growth-hacking or engineering as marketing.
There were a ton of them. PandaDoc, SparkToro, Buffer, Unsplash, Hubspot’s website grader - they all were mentioned. One of our own was there as well - VWO’s A/B testing statistical significance calculator. There were also a couple of alternative pages too - a tactic I have deployed multiple times.
But all this is just marketing, you might say. We have all done things like this before, where is the engineering, you might ask. Someone on the thread did ask, and added that coming up with a new term for what marketers have always done seems stupid.
I would agree.
On Pankaj Mishra’s Factor Daily podcast, Superhuman’s CEO Rahul Vohra had a great story.
I’ll let him tell it. It’s lightly edited to make it easy to read.
Over to Vohra:
I was very fortunate when I sold Rapportive to LinkedIn because I got to work for the Head of Growth for LinkedIn, Elliot Shmukler. He was the man who had scaled LinkedIn from about 25 million members to north of 250 million members.
In our first one on one, I sat down with him, super-excited, and said to him: Elliot, teach me everything you know about virality.
He said: There’s no point trying to optimise for viral loops and viral hooks within the product. You are not going to get it past a viral factor of 1.But what about LinkedIn, what about Facebook, I asked.
Take any feature in LinkedIn, even the most viral one - the address book, it did not sustain a viral factor of more than 0.4. Even Facebook in its heyday did not sustain a viral factor of more than 0.7, he replied.
But that doesn’t seem to match reality, I said.
Well, he said, that’s because what’s actually driving the virality, of LinkedIn, of Facebook, and frankly, of any mass market consumer brand, is real world word of mouth. It’s not address book imports, it’s not people you may know. It’s when people tell other people about the product.
Please note the features that Elliot is citing. LinkedIn’s address book import was called its holy grail. Facebook’s people-you-may-know feature was the brainchild of Chamath Palahapitiya’s much vaunted growth team; it gained him notoriety as well as a lot of respect (and money).
These are the examples that every self proclaimed growth-hacker will trot out the minute you ask him what he can do for you. And Elliot Shmukler is saying that these hacks, these tricks, don’t matter beyond a point. What actually matters is word of mouth, people telling other people.
In Freshdesk’s early days, we never talked about growth-hacking, let alone doing things that could be labelled that. What we did was good, clean marketing - getting positioning right and telling a story against an incumbent.
VWO’s early success was copybook content marketing, led by the founder himself and backed by complementary organic efforts later.
Chargebee, which I think is the best SaaS marketing team in the country right now, are killing it growth-wise. But they took some time getting their marketing to where it is now. Their effort in getting their basics right in the early stages is paying off.
Which is also why their growth team, which came later, did extremely well. Chargebee had their basics locked and loaded, and ready for them.
So repeat after me: Marketing is not engineering.
It can’t function like a light switch, in that you switch it on, and leads appear.
Growth teams and professionals can help you optimise the funnel, but they won’t build the funnel for you. You have to, your marketing team has to. The marketing team has to know and understand who you are selling to, what their motivations are to buy and use your product, and what will make them stick with you.
If all that sounds awfully like what your Kotler textbook on marketing says, well, exactly.