May 6, 2025 • 31 mins
EPISODE 7
In this episode, seasoned marketing leader Peter Farago shares zero-to-one marketing insights for early-stage startups, emphasizing empathy, iterative messaging, and organic inbound strategies. Drawing on experiences from Flurry, Acompli, and RunLLM, Peter highlights the importance of a clear value proposition, building brand credibility, and leveraging customer feedback loops. He also addresses AI’s evolving role in marketing, reassuring listeners that AI won’t replace jobs but will reshape how marketers operate. Packed with tangible advice, this conversation offers a roadmap for founders seeking to refine their product, storytelling, and growth approach in crowded markets.
CHAPTERS
00:00 – Introducing Peter Farago and the Power of Empathy
01:34 – Zero-to-One Marketing Fundamentals
08:03 – Lessons from Acompli’s Early Growth
16:42 – Leveraging Customer Feedback and Iteration
29:04 – AI’s Evolving Role in Marketing
LINKS
Connect with Peter Farago
runllm.com • LinkedIn • X/Twitter • Podcast
Stay Connected with Founder Mode
Subscribe to our newsletter: foundermode.kit.com
Connect with Kevin
Connect with Jason
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
I'd say the biggest word, the biggest single word that I think
is the most important word, which is also probably going to
be a relief to people dealing with the question of will AAI
replace my job? AI won't replace your job, it'll
change your job. But empathy is the word that's,
in my mind, a big difference between a good market and a good
product person. Is it empathy?
Can you put yourself in the shoes of that customer?
(00:33):
Welcome to founder Mode. What's up, Kevin?
How are you buddy? Good to see you.
I'm good. I'm excited.
Today we're diving into one of the most critical and sometimes
confusing phases for any startupzero to 1 marketing.
We don't have that Peter on. We have a different Peter on the
show today and I'm pretty excited about it.
What do we actually need to get those first critical users when
you have no team, no budget, maybe barely a product?
(00:55):
I'm just excited to hear from this guy.
He's somebody that you know, areyou, are you fired up?
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it's easy to get
overwhelmed by all the marketingadvice out there.
And I think it's one of those things if you start searching,
the algo feeds you more than youwant to know.
And I think it doesn't just apply to when you're starting
out. I mean, like there's constantly
the markets changing and what the market wants to hear and
what the market wants to see andsort of being able to pick up
(01:18):
those signals and then being able to make the right
adjustments and adjust to, you know, how to go do that.
And so I think it's the perfect sort of, you know, kick off to
somebody who's, you know, at anystage of the company, but I
think it's it really means the most when you're just starting
out and you sort of have that resource sort of constraint to
work through. Yeah, that's right.
And and as a career marketing and growth guy, I'm I'm
(01:38):
particularly excited about this episode.
And what I think is cool is, youknow, you and I are like, you
know, the yin and Yang and in the startup plan, like you got
to figure out your product. That's you, and you got to
figure out your distribution. And that's me.
So when we're thinking about marketing in the context of a
technical founder like yourself,what are you looking for?
What do you think? Like when you are interviewing
(01:58):
marketers or kind of getting presented a marketing plan,
they're like, hey, I'm going to do this stuff.
What's going through your head? Yeah.
And I'm, I'm kind of a, a quiet marketer, like a technical nerd
on this stuff. So like to me, the big thing is
just tracking like do you know that it's working?
So some sort of attribution, some sort of understanding of,
you know, is what we're sending out there going.
(02:18):
And then the other thing I'm looking for is are you testing
enough things quick enough? And then is there a feedback
loop? And so for me, it's like, hey,
let's try a bunch of stuff. Let's not spend a lot of time on
those things, track them so we understand it and then feed that
back in so that we can kind of learn and double down on the
ones that are working. Yeah, I love that.
I mean, for Jason, I mean, this is your jam.
Like marketing is your thing. And so, you know, for tech folks
(02:41):
out there like, you know, what do you think about this and and
how is that and how is AI changing this?
I mean, we talk about this a loton this show, but in particular
AI is transformative and highly disruptive to marketing and
marketing teams and marketers. And we'll talk, we'll talk to
Peter when we when we interview him.
But there's this fear that, well, I'm a copywriter or I'm a
(03:02):
content marketer or I'm a designer and, you know, these
tools are going to take my job. No, they're not.
Can I can tell you from personalexperience that what's happening
is the people that are crushing it right now are using these
tools to make themselves superhuman.
They're taking the image generation and allowing it to
create all sorts of concepts andideas as a designer and then
(03:24):
iterating on those. So now instead of doing, you
know, one really cool brand concept for a client, you can do
a dozen at this in the same amount of time.
And and AI hopes you do that. If you're a content marketer or
copywriter, instead of like slaving over the exact wording
you want to use, you use AI to generate ideas for you and then
(03:46):
turn those ideas into written concepts that you human writer
helped craft and shape and and give give an essence to.
And so those are specific creative examples.
And I think on the growth strategy and marketing strategy,
go to market, product marketing,it all still applies.
AI is a super accelerator of ideas and helps you be your
sparring partner as a marketer to figure out what to do and do
(04:07):
it faster. Yeah, I think of a lot as just
having like a, a team of like really excited junior interns in
your in your exactly, you know, stable, right.
You're like sitting at the tableand now instead of like being
alone at the white border, just two people in the room.
You've got a team with energy around it.
And you just need to know how toharness that energy and make
sure that you, you know, keep the things on track.
The feedback that it gives the, you know, those tools are not
(04:29):
perfect, but so sometimes you have to direct them.
But having that sort of additional sort of weapon to
use, I think it's been pretty impactful for where I've seen it
go so far. I totally agree.
And I know that you feel the same way about what it's doing
for engineering. And so I think it it this is
just going to happen across every discipline, whether you're
a a marketer or you're a software engineer or you're a
product manager, embrace the tools, embrace the innovation
(04:51):
happening the pace of it. I was reading the the things
that Sam Altman wish he had known sooner list.
So it always makes the rounds right on social.
I see the you know, the ex post and like I you know, I reread it
again, I think this morning and one of the things was like, if
you move fast, you can make a lot more mistakes and like AI is
just making you move faster, like it get it gives you more
shots on goal, right. So we're going to talk to Peter
(05:13):
today. I would love to know, you know,
the things that you and he worked on together in the
accompli days, you know, pre AI hustle, like what's the stuff
that really jumped out for you and you know that you feel like
this is what good marketing is. This is what a good marketer.
Yeah. And so I mean, Peter and I work
together Accompli, you know, he ran marketing for us and I think
a bunch of really cool campaigns.
(05:34):
We did a pretty cool video that hopefully we'll have time to
talk about. We did this Rock the doc
campaign where it was like this,a screenshot of Accompli, the
app in your doc, you're kind of like bottom 4 on your iPhone and
then post that to Twitter. And this is like in the days
where like going viral on Twitter was very different than
it is today. And I think the other thing that
Peter was incredibly good at wasjust, you know, a great sparring
(05:55):
partner on content and Wordsmansmith.
He had this like art with the pen and that was always like
this sort of incredible thing. But again, it was, you know, we
were hustling, man. We were trying to figure out, we
weren't really sure. You know, we had to build
websites and WordPress and setting all this stuff up.
And so we had a lot of interaction from engineering and
marketing of like how to set this up, how to do tracking, I
mean, how to work 3rd. And it was just really fun to
(06:15):
kind of go through that and workwith him on it.
That's a perfect segue, Kevin. We've got Peter Farrago with us
today. Peter is a seasoned marketing
leader who has navigated the zero to one phase multiple
times, including as CMO with youat Accompli where he worked
alongside awesome team that thenled to a $200 million plus
acquisition from Microsoft. He also LED marketing at Flurry
(06:36):
Analytics through its acquisition by Yahoo.
And if anyone knows what really matters in early stage
marketing, both pre and post AI buzz, it's definitely Peter.
So let's get into it. Peter, welcome to Founder Mode.
Hey, how's it going? Nice to meet you.
It's great, great to have you and great to meet you as well.
(06:58):
And you and Kevin known each other a minute, but we're we're
new friends. You've seen marketing evolve
like pretty dramatically over the 20 plus years you've been in
the Valley, especially in those early days when you hear zero to
1 marketing, what's like the core, you know, first principle
stuff that comes to mind for youand for these founders that are
listening to us today. I think it's know your audience,
(07:18):
know the value you're trying to describe to them, say it in the
words that that audience wants to hear or needs to have it told
to them. I think those are the core
things. You know, people will talk about
value proposition and messaging and positioning, and that's all
true, but I think it starts withunderstanding that audience and
the value you're bringing them and expressing that really well.
You're going to keep trying to express that several different
(07:40):
ways. There'll be lots of iterations
and lots of different ways you do it, but that's the key.
Great to have you on. I mean, thinking back to our
accompli days, it's been a minute.
We were jumping into like this crazy crowded market, right?
There was, you know, 50 e-mail apps.
If you remember what was the first marketing move we made
Like before we even have a polished product, you know,
trying to, you know, nothing wasreally ready, like just trying
(08:01):
to figure it out. Like how did we kind of
breakthrough? Well, there's two parts I think
about one was, you know, what you guys had already was a
really fast iteration cycle where you were pushing out like
a breakneck speeds, you're pushing out weekly releases and
you had a pretty large beta audience.
So as far as understanding called the feature set and the
things that were resonating and you know, having already some
(08:24):
built in, this is still a littlebit of early days of social, but
built in kind of audience for for trying to drive word of
mouth organically. That was all kind of there.
What we didn't have was I'd say kind of the, it was really
lacking fit and finish. You know, it looked like 1/2
engineering page, landing page that was holding up there.
The the logo is like clip art, but that's pretty normal.
(08:48):
The main thing was just trying to get that story polished.
Who are we, you know, what was the value prop?
Who, who are we really competingwith?
I think in the end it wasn't so much other apps.
It was, it was the iPhones native app, the client that
shipped with it. That was really honestly like
the no decision decision for consumers.
It was sort of like, hey, it's on here, it works.
(09:08):
Oh, I didn't know e-mail could be so good on a mobile phone.
Oh, I'll just use this. But we had different
aspirations. And so we ended up, I think the
positioning was around, you know, it was like e-mail just
got a promotion and was do more,defer less because we were
speaking to a knowledge worker, a professional worker who we
felt didn't want to triage theire-mail.
They didn't want to just kind of, you know, swipe, swipe,
(09:28):
swipe and delete stuff until they could actually get to their
desk and get anything done. And what you guys had built, and
this is what the beta audience was showing us was you guys
could schedule things. You could always schedule really
effectively. You could share your schedule
with someone. You could do calendar, right,
calendar negotiation, you guys could attach files, all these
things and you were very you were totally interoperable.
So, so that was really a big deal.
(09:49):
And, you know, if you think about a professional at work,
you know, going back-to-back to back meetings, you know, this
way they could get stuff done during the meetings, between
meetings in the hallway, whatever.
And that he wouldn't have like 10 hours of meetings and have to
go home and do five hours of e-mail and then get their actual
work done. Yeah, I love the idea that like
we had a kind of crappy logo so we we up leveled it.
(10:09):
But you're really saying like we, we figured out what the
value was that we brought and then we connected that with our
audience and, and put together some messaging that would
resonate with them. So that, that, that hits home
for me as a, as a career marketer.
I I love that. And then you know, you've LED
marketing Peter from pre revenueto significant.
It's multiple times founders, you know, they struggle with
(10:30):
knowing what to market when the product is still evolving.
How do you think about crafting the initial message or story
when things are are still so fluid?
So a lot of it again is that, you know, how do you sell or
market when it's not fully bakedand it's evolving.
And so again, it's that it's like kind of that North Star
vision you're going after and you're building that and it
(10:52):
doesn't happen all at once. It gets, there's a lot of
iteration, like if you make a set of assets, one of the things
I like about being early and doing a lot of things myself, as
I write the press release, I write the boilerplate for it.
I write the, you know, all the homepage copyright you, you do
the, you know, you help with a product deck and emails out the
cut. And you keep getting lots of
attempts to keep trying to explain it over and over.
(11:13):
And and things come out over time, like where where again,
you're extracting it more from the founders, like the the
position, the story and the narrative exists.
We I have to extract it more. The other thing I'll say, it
happens to me a lot and I'm in an AI company now with
professors and pH DS in AI and whole careers in it.
Similarly, at Accompli, you know, these guys, they were have
(11:34):
been there done that team who still wanted to win.
And in particular, JJ and Kevin had built e-mail successfully
across several platforms. And so, you know, starting back
at open wave and so on and and then Zebra.
And so they've made e-mail firstlike as a client, then in the
cloud and now they're doing it mobile.
And so this team, this team had crazy domain experience and I
(11:57):
did not. So, you know, my job is not to
really not to understand like the domain as deeply as they do,
but to think about somebody fromthe outside, a potential
customer and how they might lookat the value we're going to
bring. So there is this translation I'm
doing and I not trying to becomean expert at the same level
because I can't. And it's also not my job, but I
am extracting and shaping a story and I am and I am focused.
(12:20):
It's like when you're driving, you're looking down the road,
not like down at your bumper. Yeah.
I mean, founders also kind of feel this pressure to do
everything. Do you remember back, like, or
maybe even today when you're looking at your current company,
what things you explicitly decided not to do?
And how do you kind of make thatdecision of like, you know,
there's content, social PR, paidads, you know, there's just a
(12:41):
bunch of ways. I think, you know, Peter, I
think the one thing that I always remember just an
incredible writer, right? And so I think you mentioned
earlier like, hey, you, a lot ofthis is writing, right?
You're creating content, whetherit's blogs, website copy, social
copy, emails, etcetera. Like how do you kind of decide
like what not to focus on when you're sort of looking at sort
of crafting that some initial message and sort of deciding
(13:01):
like what channels or where to get this out there?
Yeah. You know, someone early in my
career described marketing's assets and distribution.
So like, I think about the content, the writing, those are
all assets and then you're mentioning like how you get it
out there. I think about that as the
distribution, the promotion. And I usually start with the
assets and thinking about the comment for writing.
(13:22):
I, I talk a lot. And so writing is a way to clear
my head honestly and shape things better and get it
straight for myself and also show people to get feedback.
And then there's an art of like writing.
The website is not like anythingyou write.
It's like lots of little phrasesand snippets and it's all kind
of put together in this, you know, gestalt thing.
And so it's a little bit of a weird, it's a little bit of a
weird thing. But where I usually start is
(13:44):
loosely, it's an audit, I guess it's informal.
Normally it's like, does the company have enough of a brand
look and feel that I can work with?
And I've worked on some very expensive high end stuff like my
consumer days at Electronic Artsand stuff.
We spent unreal amounts of time and money developing brand
(14:05):
assets. You know, start up.
Yeah, at a start up it's like, you know, you just need to be
good enough from really professional.
It's really about credibility. Is this company going to be
around in five years, especiallyif you're doing B to B stuff,
that's what matters. So usually it's this audit of
like, do we have a set of assetsthat kind of look like they work
together. They don't have to reinforce
(14:25):
each other and have, you know, all this positioning and
messaging tree stuff. Like you can get very ornate
with that. But at a startup, it's like
directly that fits together. Then as far as getting out in
the distribution of it, I kind of think about like it's a
little bit of like what's working today and it's a little
bit of like, what is the companya candidate for?
And so like an example is a company I was at before accompli
(14:50):
was called Flurry. They did mobile application
analytics. So we would help.
We had like 90%. We like own the market and we
had as a result all this data about consumers, how they
downloaded and used apps and retention rates across all these
categories. So we told a lot of and our
customer was a developer, app developer.
So we told a lot of data storiesthat would help them with their
(15:10):
business as far as like acquisition, engagement,
retention, monetization and that's kind of where our
products lined up. So so that company was a
candidate for thought leadershipbased on data back stories.
Our company, you know, obviouslywas not.
We tried some blogging and some insights to try to build up, you
know, a little bit of a following, but that was very
hard. Social worked for us pretty well
(15:31):
because we had a lot of influential people that you guys
had built up in the beta in sortof back then.
You know, like product hunt was still big.
So we pushed on product Hunt because people were looking for
buzzy consumer ish products. So, so then, you know, for a
launch was like, let's do that. We've talked about in previous
episodes this idea of building this network.
So as a, as a kind of CMO acrossmultiple businesses leading
(15:54):
marketing growth, you've had to build this network of people
that are really, really skilled that can go do this and tell
interesting stories and across different channels in the right
way. I want to, I want to double
click on the idea of breaking through because I think when you
talk about like a, you know, an Apple brand spot, that's what
people think of as like, how do we think different, right?
How do we show up in a differentway?
Is there like a signal or early pieces of feedback from
(16:16):
customers that really helps you,especially in the zero to 1
phases, Maybe it flurries or hacker one that fundamentally
changed how you approach marketing or even product
direction. And bonus points like flurry.
I just want to call out 2014 acquired by Yahoo for a ton of
money. Like, dude, you've you've got a
great track record here. So I think for for founders
(16:36):
listening like there's some Nuggets that I just want to make
sure pay attention. Peter, Peter has seen some
stuff, right. So what what do you what do you
say to like customer gives you an insight that actually makes
its way into the product or marketing strategy?
That's interesting. I mean, look, I part of part of
what first say is I can't pick well, if you've done investing
(16:56):
or joined a bunch of startups, you know, like you kind of know
you're especially with your own work, you're putting putting
your egg in one basket for several years.
So I do try to figure out if theteam, the team has something
right, like, you know, I think it's like, are they going at the
most important things that are they going after the most
interesting market they can and do they have something quote UN
(17:18):
quote disruptive? I like disruptive stuff because
I like to kind of tella here's how things are now.
Here's how things are going to change like the Today, tomorrow
story. So, so the caveat up front is I
am looking for companies trying to take big swings who have
great teams and you know, you don't always know.
I've been at many startups 1 didnot one was like not what I
(17:38):
thought it was. And it was it was it was a mess.
But such as a startup life. Your question, your question
exactly, Jason, was what? It was basically like, how do
you think about breaking through?
The breakthrough. Yeah, taking, you know, signal,
right, like customer signal, user signal in zero to 1 and in
like pulling out an insight and saying, oh, you know what, this
(17:59):
user is telling us something really interesting here.
Let's apply that to the to the go to market, to the product
strategy to how we're talking about this.
If there's something jumps out we can, I'd love to hear.
It. No, no, There's a lot.
There's a lot. I guess I'm thinking about it
because I guess the first thing is I'd say the biggest word, the
biggest single word that I thinkis the most important word,
which is also probably going to be a relief to people dealing
(18:21):
with the question of will AI replace my job?
AI won't replace your job, it'llchange your job.
But empathy is the word that's in my mind.
So what I find, you know, I, Kevin, went to good schools, I
went to good schools. You know, I, I have fancy
degrees. I worked at big companies, But
like a big difference between a good market and a good product
person is an empathy. And so, and what I mean is like,
(18:42):
can you put yourself in the shoes of that customer and like,
what are their, what's their pain?
What's their aspiration? You know, what are the dynamics
like at work for them to make a decision?
How easy are you making it for them to to try you and make a
decision? So like that momentum piece is
really, I think it comes from somehow understanding the
customer really well. Signals come from lots of
(19:04):
places. The best is if you can use the
product yourself, honestly. But I work on a lot of stuff I
can't use, you know, like if I went to cursor, how did that
work for? Us like with accompli, right,
like we had like, you know, we had this sort of product
engineering sort of marketing loop and like I think the nice
thing about emails, we did use the product, right.
But like, you know, does that work today and you're in the
company you're working at today.Like, are you the same kind of
(19:26):
user that you were as an e-mail user?
Well, we had a thesis at Accompli that, you know, people
wanted to get things done and they wanted to, you know, Javier
had a pretty clear story or distilled down into like, you
know, find things easier, right,That kind of thing.
You know, he had he had a list of a few things.
So that thesis was pretty that was pretty well understood and
(19:48):
we were building in that direction and we're getting
positive feedback. In fact, I think you set up,
Kevin, you were particularly good at feedback loops.
I think we were using, we were using, we were getting lots of
feedback from a lot of differentplaces.
How I do it today is we record all our calls, sales calls, and
I listen to a lot of sales callsand I pull transcripts and run
them through ChatGPT. And then I try to separate the
(20:09):
garbage answers from the good answers and, and, and now I'm
doing we have really good impactfor our early set of customers
meeting our stuff really works well.
So now I'm. Doing interviews for case
studies, success stories, and you know, I, that's actually
quite different than a sales call where I walk them through,
(20:29):
you know, I'm trying to extract a story from them, but it's
really a very simple, a problem,solution, results kind of story.
So it's like what we're using before, you know, what made you
decide you needed to fix something?
You know what, what did you lookat?
What did you choose? What was your first experience
like with that? So I'm actually now getting the
benefit of walking people through very carefully and
understanding decision by the buying criteria, substitutes,
(20:52):
alternatives, competition. Again, you know, we're in a
world where people are just kindof doing it themselves.
That's a lot of what we compete against is DIY versus like an
actual established competitor. While the product is technical
today, the one I work on, what we do is actually pretty
straightforward from a value, but we answer questions, we
answer technical questions that users have.
(21:12):
That's kind of basically what. We do.
I love that you're talking to customers and you're listening
to sales calls. Every time I talk to a founder
or a marketing leader or a product or engineering leader
who doesn't do that, I'm like, this company's probably not
going to make it right. And so it just makes my heart
happy to hear to hear that and like it it, it bodes well for
run LLM. You know, you're in this kind of
(21:32):
noisy AI infra market. Can you walk us through the non
scalable experiments, the channels, the messages, the
community hacks that you kind ofthink about and have run in the,
you know, the early days and andwhat did you decide?
Like what was your approach and your framework for deciding on
what, what would I double down on?
What do I kill? What is that kind of North Star
metric That's like, oh man, we. That's it.
(21:54):
I'm looking for it now. I've gone through and reset the
story and have a better version of the website and I'm doing it
again in the background again because not there, it needs to
be. And we are starting to try and
we are driving some organic inbound lead.
So it's AB2B company in the end.And we actually weren't sure.
In fact, in the last several months, we were like, are we
going to be more PLG and having high volume, like just have to
(22:18):
really work on growth and conversion, you know, premium up
sell or are we going to like getto the mid market sooner than we
think, which is actually what's happening.
There's compression. Bigger companies are willing to
adopt AI faster than say they were SAS before this.
I'm finding there's a compression in the market for
demand for this kind of thing. So as far as figuring it out,
like again, I kind of go back toI got some feel for the
(22:42):
customer. Listen, some calls leaning
heavily on the CEO who's, who's like a great guy, like can
really explain things and you know, no ego and just, you know,
we're trying to figure out the story.
And then again, like what's working or what are we trying?
Like I think today we're we, we announced the public beta and
what we did there was not was not dissemble this like a couple
(23:04):
months ago. And that was a good cycle for
us. We basically did the friends and
family outreach to everybody we knew to like.
And unfortunately the company has a very good network of
people who are deep in the spacebecause they come from academia
and they have a ton of like realBallers who are actually doing
this stuff. And so a lot of them, you know,
we wrote like a very a series ofblood.
(23:25):
We had a whole launch week, but we wrote like what would be the
equivalent of a really good press release pushed to our blog
and pushed promoted on social. Social for us is mainly LinkedIn
and and X to an extent, but X has been falling apart as well.
So for us, it's really LinkedIn now.
LinkedIn in the last 18 to 24 months has really become like
the only platform, I think for Bto B for for social, but it is
(23:48):
extremely noisy. You mentioned that especially
for AI stuff. So I think for us when I came
into this company, because there's, there's sounded by two
Cal professors and two PhDs thatcame out of Cal all with heavy
like LLMAI, machine learning, computer science backgrounds,
thought leadership came to mind,right?
Is it this guys are a candidate for thought leadership?
(24:09):
And The thing is founders role at this stage, like is it, you
know, are they the main Blogger?Are they the main salesperson PR
person? Like how do they focus like
their time? Because I'm sure it's limited in
terms of how much they can spendwith marketing versus product or
other things. That's right, That's right.
And this is this all works dovetails in because I can
handle kind of both. I know I'm going on a longer
answer here, but the CEO, the other thing they were candidate
(24:30):
for is founder marketing becausethe CEO and the professor were
right. One of the professors guy named
Joey, Joey and Vikram is our CEO.
So Vikram and Joey have been writing for over a year like a
sub stack weekly blog. They call the AI frontier.
And it's actually a mass. It's separate to our company,
but it's a mass, a pretty good following.
And it's where they just talk about where the state of AI is.
(24:51):
And you know, have we reached toAGI or some concept, right?
So they're just thinking very big and in a cerebral way.
And so that exists already. And so I knew.
So one thing I have to feel out like Javier at was ACEO at
Accompli and he was great in front of people.
And the CEO at hacker one was was more shy and the CTO is more
(25:12):
shy, but they had a lot of the CTO take that credibility with
customers and analyst here. The CEO is, is a really good
balance. His role I would say is he's
product leader and he's founder selling still.
He's at the end of founder selling.
He's we have our first kind of Rep and then I'm pitching in a
little. I'm trying not to pull myself
too out of position, but I'm also selling a little and and
(25:33):
then, you know, he has an engineering background, of
course, but someone else is running engineering and he is
pretty good about like not doingmore than he he should, but he's
doing everything kind of when I joined, it was like, again, I
like accompli actually was I think I was the only person
without ACS degree who wasn't building, who wasn't a maker.
So so you know I. That makes it so that you have
(25:54):
like this unique perspective, though, which is great, right?
Like, I think you you end up coming in and you're you're the
guy who should be looked to as the expert in marketing.
I'd never tell Kevin how to write code or at this point,
tell Devin AI how to write code.But you know, I think it's
similarly like, you know, it's easy for marketers to get sucked
into this trap of, you know, well, everybody's a consumer.
So everybody thinks they know marketing and it's, you know,
(26:15):
being able to establish now hereare the frameworks.
Here's the approach. Here's how we do this.
We're going to do thought leadership and this is how you
do thought leadership, right? This is how we're going to
leverage our CEO and our founder.
And so I want to talk about thisthing that you that you've kind
of talked about on your profile and you mentioned LinkedIn and
like tell me about creative destruction.
What is that? What does that mean to you?
Like give me the pithy, like if I'm a founder and I'm thinking
(26:35):
about my first kind of marketing, go to market, what is
how, how could I leverage Peter's creative destruction?
Yeah, I think it's a play on. I mean, it's a, it's a concept
that now I'm blanking on who came up with it and properly
attribute it. But creative, creative
destruction is the idea that sorry, what am I saying on my
LinkedIn? Because I think I I might have
tweaked that. Yeah.
(26:56):
It's crave destruction. It is crave destruction.
Crave destruction is the original term.
Sorry, I had to, Yeah. It's it's, there's a German word
that I can't pronounce and it's an economic concept, right, that
describes. The process.
Where you innovations replace and make obsolete older
innovations. But I think it applies to
marketing, which is I'm guessingwhere you're taking this.
Yeah, and I think it's because Iwork on, it's the types of
(27:16):
things I choose to work on. And I think I also am putting it
up there because because there is a like like to challenge the
status quo. There's sort of an there's sort
of an irreverence or defiance I have built in as part of my
personality that I try to kind of hide because, you know, like
it doesn't always work in corporate culture.
And I just come out of five years at Yahoo where, you know,
(27:39):
by DNA design, whatever the innovation in entrepreneurship
is not there anymore. It's like been it gets beaten
down pretty hard if you try. So I think for me it was that
idea of getting back to what I really love to do.
It's just like, I love nothing more than to to take a run at a
major incumbent and knock them off.
Like I just like the David versus Goliath story.
(27:59):
And I like, I like the idea. Well, and I like the idea.
And I think when I find Kevin has this people, I work like
there is a, there is a I'm goingto bet on myself.
Yeah. I'm not intimidated by you and
your big company. In fact, you're, you're slow.
You're slow because of it. You have all this legacy
inertia. You can't get out of your own
(28:20):
way. And I'm going to, I'm going to
cut you apart. Just watch.
And I love that idea because it's so the creative destruction
to me is like, it's maybe it's akung fuish type thing, but the
energy is already there. Things are being replaced.
There are cycles of replacement happening all the time.
And incumbents were resisted, ofcourse, because they're trying
to push out their revenue and profit curves.
But, you know, there are there. I, I like it when something new
(28:43):
comes along that can make thingsbetter.
And it sort of can't be denied, but there's going to be
resistance against it for a while just because that's the
way it works. And I like to be the one who
helps. It helps push it through.
So that's a great place to leaveit because that's like, that's
it. You know, you're, you're, you're
David and you're going to, you're going to make the next
thing happen. I love it.
(29:05):
And the tools, the tools, I willsay real quick, the tools, this
is going to help hopefully with an answer.
Before that you might, I don't know if you want to edit this
around, but when I start with a small company, a lot of it's
about managing the budget. So I'm always organic inbound.
So thought leadership, SEO content, those are always the
place to start. If you have thought leadership,
you can accelerate that. Paid media is not going to work
(29:26):
well initially anyway, as you guys know, the way the auction
works and Kevin's actually quitean expert in this.
So, so you can't go into paid media because it's going to be
inefficient and bleed you out. So you have to build up your
brand, your story, your base, your following.
You got to do it with inbound out of the work.
You got to be good at that anyway, because that's kind of
what's available to you and whatcan work and also build a
foundation for the future. I love it.
(29:48):
Peter, where can folks find you and learn more about your work?
Yeah, I think LinkedIn is an easy place to find me and I try
to keep everything up to date. And you can.
That's just Peter Farrago there.And then, you know, I'm on all
the socials. You can also, you know, I'm
promoting a lot of what we're doing in and around AI at my
company. You'll find that you know
through my LinkedIn. It's run LLM.
(30:10):
That's an easy place. To start, awesome brother.
Thanks for coming out and good to see you.
And well, that was Peter Fargo breaking down marketing zero to
1. I mean, huge thanks to Peter for
sharing all the tips and practical insights.
And you know, quite frankly, some more stories from Flurry
and Accompli and you know now what he's doing with Run LLM.
You know, I think hopefully thatgives you a clearer picture of,
you know, where to focus your energy in these, you know, kind
of early days. Like what did you think, Jason?
(30:31):
Yeah, you know, this one is a near and dear to my heart as a
as a career marketing and growthguy.
You know, know your audience, start with a clear understanding
of who they are and your value for them, your value
proposition. There's nothing more important
than that. Next is iterating quickly on the
brand on messaging, whether you start with the clip art logo or
not, get to the right message for that audience and, and get
(30:53):
there quickly. In doing so, you probably will
use customer feedback loop. So you know, understanding the
customer and then using that to improve the product and the
storytelling. Peter's listening to sales calls
that matters, right? He understands the customer
deeply. And then focus on organic
inbound and thought leadership before paid.
This is especially relevant in in a situation like Peter's
(31:15):
where you're doing B to B marketing.
You have larger customers and longer sales cycles.
And so you you want to make surethat you've got a system that
works before you spend a bunch of money on ads.
So that that for me was the big stuff.
I jumped out. I hope you found it useful.
If you liked the episode, pleasegive us a like and subscribe.
Share it with the founder that'swrestling with their initial
marketing strategy. And we'll be back next time with
another deep dive into this founder journey.
(31:35):
Awesome. Thanks again for listening to
Founder Mode. Remember, in the beginning it's
not about complex funnels, it's about finding those first
believers.
I'd say the biggest word, the biggest single word that I think
is the most important word, which is also probably going to
be a relief to people dealing with the question of will AAI
replace my job? AI won't replace your job, it'll
change your job. But empathy is the word that's,
in my mind, a big difference between a good market and a good
product person. Is it empathy?
Can you put yourself in the shoes of that customer?
(00:33):
Welcome to founder Mode. What's up, Kevin?
How are you buddy? Good to see you.
I'm good. I'm excited.
Today we're diving into one of the most critical and sometimes
confusing phases for any startupzero to 1 marketing.
We don't have that Peter on. We have a different Peter on the
show today and I'm pretty excited about it.
What do we actually need to get those first critical users when
you have no team, no budget, maybe barely a product?
(00:55):
I'm just excited to hear from this guy.
He's somebody that you know, areyou, are you fired up?
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it's easy to get
overwhelmed by all the marketingadvice out there.
And I think it's one of those things if you start searching,
the algo feeds you more than youwant to know.
And I think it doesn't just apply to when you're starting
out. I mean, like there's constantly
the markets changing and what the market wants to hear and
what the market wants to see andsort of being able to pick up
(01:18):
those signals and then being able to make the right
adjustments and adjust to, you know, how to go do that.
And so I think it's the perfect sort of, you know, kick off to
somebody who's, you know, at anystage of the company, but I
think it's it really means the most when you're just starting
out and you sort of have that resource sort of constraint to
work through. Yeah, that's right.
And and as a career marketing and growth guy, I'm I'm
(01:38):
particularly excited about this episode.
And what I think is cool is, youknow, you and I are like, you
know, the yin and Yang and in the startup plan, like you got
to figure out your product. That's you, and you got to
figure out your distribution. And that's me.
So when we're thinking about marketing in the context of a
technical founder like yourself,what are you looking for?
What do you think? Like when you are interviewing
(01:58):
marketers or kind of getting presented a marketing plan,
they're like, hey, I'm going to do this stuff.
What's going through your head? Yeah.
And I'm, I'm kind of a, a quiet marketer, like a technical nerd
on this stuff. So like to me, the big thing is
just tracking like do you know that it's working?
So some sort of attribution, some sort of understanding of,
you know, is what we're sending out there going.
(02:18):
And then the other thing I'm looking for is are you testing
enough things quick enough? And then is there a feedback
loop? And so for me, it's like, hey,
let's try a bunch of stuff. Let's not spend a lot of time on
those things, track them so we understand it and then feed that
back in so that we can kind of learn and double down on the
ones that are working. Yeah, I love that.
I mean, for Jason, I mean, this is your jam.
Like marketing is your thing. And so, you know, for tech folks
(02:41):
out there like, you know, what do you think about this and and
how is that and how is AI changing this?
I mean, we talk about this a loton this show, but in particular
AI is transformative and highly disruptive to marketing and
marketing teams and marketers. And we'll talk, we'll talk to
Peter when we when we interview him.
But there's this fear that, well, I'm a copywriter or I'm a
(03:02):
content marketer or I'm a designer and, you know, these
tools are going to take my job. No, they're not.
Can I can tell you from personalexperience that what's happening
is the people that are crushing it right now are using these
tools to make themselves superhuman.
They're taking the image generation and allowing it to
create all sorts of concepts andideas as a designer and then
(03:24):
iterating on those. So now instead of doing, you
know, one really cool brand concept for a client, you can do
a dozen at this in the same amount of time.
And and AI hopes you do that. If you're a content marketer or
copywriter, instead of like slaving over the exact wording
you want to use, you use AI to generate ideas for you and then
(03:46):
turn those ideas into written concepts that you human writer
helped craft and shape and and give give an essence to.
And so those are specific creative examples.
And I think on the growth strategy and marketing strategy,
go to market, product marketing,it all still applies.
AI is a super accelerator of ideas and helps you be your
sparring partner as a marketer to figure out what to do and do
(04:07):
it faster. Yeah, I think of a lot as just
having like a, a team of like really excited junior interns in
your in your exactly, you know, stable, right.
You're like sitting at the tableand now instead of like being
alone at the white border, just two people in the room.
You've got a team with energy around it.
And you just need to know how toharness that energy and make
sure that you, you know, keep the things on track.
The feedback that it gives the, you know, those tools are not
(04:29):
perfect, but so sometimes you have to direct them.
But having that sort of additional sort of weapon to
use, I think it's been pretty impactful for where I've seen it
go so far. I totally agree.
And I know that you feel the same way about what it's doing
for engineering. And so I think it it this is
just going to happen across every discipline, whether you're
a a marketer or you're a software engineer or you're a
product manager, embrace the tools, embrace the innovation
(04:51):
happening the pace of it. I was reading the the things
that Sam Altman wish he had known sooner list.
So it always makes the rounds right on social.
I see the you know, the ex post and like I you know, I reread it
again, I think this morning and one of the things was like, if
you move fast, you can make a lot more mistakes and like AI is
just making you move faster, like it get it gives you more
shots on goal, right. So we're going to talk to Peter
(05:13):
today. I would love to know, you know,
the things that you and he worked on together in the
accompli days, you know, pre AI hustle, like what's the stuff
that really jumped out for you and you know that you feel like
this is what good marketing is. This is what a good marketer.
Yeah. And so I mean, Peter and I work
together Accompli, you know, he ran marketing for us and I think
a bunch of really cool campaigns.
(05:34):
We did a pretty cool video that hopefully we'll have time to
talk about. We did this Rock the doc
campaign where it was like this,a screenshot of Accompli, the
app in your doc, you're kind of like bottom 4 on your iPhone and
then post that to Twitter. And this is like in the days
where like going viral on Twitter was very different than
it is today. And I think the other thing that
Peter was incredibly good at wasjust, you know, a great sparring
(05:55):
partner on content and Wordsmansmith.
He had this like art with the pen and that was always like
this sort of incredible thing. But again, it was, you know, we
were hustling, man. We were trying to figure out, we
weren't really sure. You know, we had to build
websites and WordPress and setting all this stuff up.
And so we had a lot of interaction from engineering and
marketing of like how to set this up, how to do tracking, I
mean, how to work 3rd. And it was just really fun to
(06:15):
kind of go through that and workwith him on it.
That's a perfect segue, Kevin. We've got Peter Farrago with us
today. Peter is a seasoned marketing
leader who has navigated the zero to one phase multiple
times, including as CMO with youat Accompli where he worked
alongside awesome team that thenled to a $200 million plus
acquisition from Microsoft. He also LED marketing at Flurry
(06:36):
Analytics through its acquisition by Yahoo.
And if anyone knows what really matters in early stage
marketing, both pre and post AI buzz, it's definitely Peter.
So let's get into it. Peter, welcome to Founder Mode.
Hey, how's it going? Nice to meet you.
It's great, great to have you and great to meet you as well.
(06:58):
And you and Kevin known each other a minute, but we're we're
new friends. You've seen marketing evolve
like pretty dramatically over the 20 plus years you've been in
the Valley, especially in those early days when you hear zero to
1 marketing, what's like the core, you know, first principle
stuff that comes to mind for youand for these founders that are
listening to us today. I think it's know your audience,
(07:18):
know the value you're trying to describe to them, say it in the
words that that audience wants to hear or needs to have it told
to them. I think those are the core
things. You know, people will talk about
value proposition and messaging and positioning, and that's all
true, but I think it starts withunderstanding that audience and
the value you're bringing them and expressing that really well.
You're going to keep trying to express that several different
(07:40):
ways. There'll be lots of iterations
and lots of different ways you do it, but that's the key.
Great to have you on. I mean, thinking back to our
accompli days, it's been a minute.
We were jumping into like this crazy crowded market, right?
There was, you know, 50 e-mail apps.
If you remember what was the first marketing move we made
Like before we even have a polished product, you know,
trying to, you know, nothing wasreally ready, like just trying
(08:01):
to figure it out. Like how did we kind of
breakthrough? Well, there's two parts I think
about one was, you know, what you guys had already was a
really fast iteration cycle where you were pushing out like
a breakneck speeds, you're pushing out weekly releases and
you had a pretty large beta audience.
So as far as understanding called the feature set and the
things that were resonating and you know, having already some
(08:24):
built in, this is still a littlebit of early days of social, but
built in kind of audience for for trying to drive word of
mouth organically. That was all kind of there.
What we didn't have was I'd say kind of the, it was really
lacking fit and finish. You know, it looked like 1/2
engineering page, landing page that was holding up there.
The the logo is like clip art, but that's pretty normal.
(08:48):
The main thing was just trying to get that story polished.
Who are we, you know, what was the value prop?
Who, who are we really competingwith?
I think in the end it wasn't so much other apps.
It was, it was the iPhones native app, the client that
shipped with it. That was really honestly like
the no decision decision for consumers.
It was sort of like, hey, it's on here, it works.
(09:08):
Oh, I didn't know e-mail could be so good on a mobile phone.
Oh, I'll just use this. But we had different
aspirations. And so we ended up, I think the
positioning was around, you know, it was like e-mail just
got a promotion and was do more,defer less because we were
speaking to a knowledge worker, a professional worker who we
felt didn't want to triage theire-mail.
They didn't want to just kind of, you know, swipe, swipe,
(09:28):
swipe and delete stuff until they could actually get to their
desk and get anything done. And what you guys had built, and
this is what the beta audience was showing us was you guys
could schedule things. You could always schedule really
effectively. You could share your schedule
with someone. You could do calendar, right,
calendar negotiation, you guys could attach files, all these
things and you were very you were totally interoperable.
So, so that was really a big deal.
(09:49):
And, you know, if you think about a professional at work,
you know, going back-to-back to back meetings, you know, this
way they could get stuff done during the meetings, between
meetings in the hallway, whatever.
And that he wouldn't have like 10 hours of meetings and have to
go home and do five hours of e-mail and then get their actual
work done. Yeah, I love the idea that like
we had a kind of crappy logo so we we up leveled it.
(10:09):
But you're really saying like we, we figured out what the
value was that we brought and then we connected that with our
audience and, and put together some messaging that would
resonate with them. So that, that, that hits home
for me as a, as a career marketer.
I I love that. And then you know, you've LED
marketing Peter from pre revenueto significant.
It's multiple times founders, you know, they struggle with
(10:30):
knowing what to market when the product is still evolving.
How do you think about crafting the initial message or story
when things are are still so fluid?
So a lot of it again is that, you know, how do you sell or
market when it's not fully bakedand it's evolving.
And so again, it's that it's like kind of that North Star
vision you're going after and you're building that and it
(10:52):
doesn't happen all at once. It gets, there's a lot of
iteration, like if you make a set of assets, one of the things
I like about being early and doing a lot of things myself, as
I write the press release, I write the boilerplate for it.
I write the, you know, all the homepage copyright you, you do
the, you know, you help with a product deck and emails out the
cut. And you keep getting lots of
attempts to keep trying to explain it over and over.
(11:13):
And and things come out over time, like where where again,
you're extracting it more from the founders, like the the
position, the story and the narrative exists.
We I have to extract it more. The other thing I'll say, it
happens to me a lot and I'm in an AI company now with
professors and pH DS in AI and whole careers in it.
Similarly, at Accompli, you know, these guys, they were have
(11:34):
been there done that team who still wanted to win.
And in particular, JJ and Kevin had built e-mail successfully
across several platforms. And so, you know, starting back
at open wave and so on and and then Zebra.
And so they've made e-mail firstlike as a client, then in the
cloud and now they're doing it mobile.
And so this team, this team had crazy domain experience and I
(11:57):
did not. So, you know, my job is not to
really not to understand like the domain as deeply as they do,
but to think about somebody fromthe outside, a potential
customer and how they might lookat the value we're going to
bring. So there is this translation I'm
doing and I not trying to becomean expert at the same level
because I can't. And it's also not my job, but I
am extracting and shaping a story and I am and I am focused.
(12:20):
It's like when you're driving, you're looking down the road,
not like down at your bumper. Yeah.
I mean, founders also kind of feel this pressure to do
everything. Do you remember back, like, or
maybe even today when you're looking at your current company,
what things you explicitly decided not to do?
And how do you kind of make thatdecision of like, you know,
there's content, social PR, paidads, you know, there's just a
(12:41):
bunch of ways. I think, you know, Peter, I
think the one thing that I always remember just an
incredible writer, right? And so I think you mentioned
earlier like, hey, you, a lot ofthis is writing, right?
You're creating content, whetherit's blogs, website copy, social
copy, emails, etcetera. Like how do you kind of decide
like what not to focus on when you're sort of looking at sort
of crafting that some initial message and sort of deciding
(13:01):
like what channels or where to get this out there?
Yeah. You know, someone early in my
career described marketing's assets and distribution.
So like, I think about the content, the writing, those are
all assets and then you're mentioning like how you get it
out there. I think about that as the
distribution, the promotion. And I usually start with the
assets and thinking about the comment for writing.
(13:22):
I, I talk a lot. And so writing is a way to clear
my head honestly and shape things better and get it
straight for myself and also show people to get feedback.
And then there's an art of like writing.
The website is not like anythingyou write.
It's like lots of little phrasesand snippets and it's all kind
of put together in this, you know, gestalt thing.
And so it's a little bit of a weird, it's a little bit of a
weird thing. But where I usually start is
(13:44):
loosely, it's an audit, I guess it's informal.
Normally it's like, does the company have enough of a brand
look and feel that I can work with?
And I've worked on some very expensive high end stuff like my
consumer days at Electronic Artsand stuff.
We spent unreal amounts of time and money developing brand
(14:05):
assets. You know, start up.
Yeah, at a start up it's like, you know, you just need to be
good enough from really professional.
It's really about credibility. Is this company going to be
around in five years, especiallyif you're doing B to B stuff,
that's what matters. So usually it's this audit of
like, do we have a set of assetsthat kind of look like they work
together. They don't have to reinforce
(14:25):
each other and have, you know, all this positioning and
messaging tree stuff. Like you can get very ornate
with that. But at a startup, it's like
directly that fits together. Then as far as getting out in
the distribution of it, I kind of think about like it's a
little bit of like what's working today and it's a little
bit of like, what is the companya candidate for?
And so like an example is a company I was at before accompli
(14:50):
was called Flurry. They did mobile application
analytics. So we would help.
We had like 90%. We like own the market and we
had as a result all this data about consumers, how they
downloaded and used apps and retention rates across all these
categories. So we told a lot of and our
customer was a developer, app developer.
So we told a lot of data storiesthat would help them with their
(15:10):
business as far as like acquisition, engagement,
retention, monetization and that's kind of where our
products lined up. So so that company was a
candidate for thought leadershipbased on data back stories.
Our company, you know, obviouslywas not.
We tried some blogging and some insights to try to build up, you
know, a little bit of a following, but that was very
hard. Social worked for us pretty well
(15:31):
because we had a lot of influential people that you guys
had built up in the beta in sortof back then.
You know, like product hunt was still big.
So we pushed on product Hunt because people were looking for
buzzy consumer ish products. So, so then, you know, for a
launch was like, let's do that. We've talked about in previous
episodes this idea of building this network.
So as a, as a kind of CMO acrossmultiple businesses leading
(15:54):
marketing growth, you've had to build this network of people
that are really, really skilled that can go do this and tell
interesting stories and across different channels in the right
way. I want to, I want to double
click on the idea of breaking through because I think when you
talk about like a, you know, an Apple brand spot, that's what
people think of as like, how do we think different, right?
How do we show up in a differentway?
Is there like a signal or early pieces of feedback from
(16:16):
customers that really helps you,especially in the zero to 1
phases, Maybe it flurries or hacker one that fundamentally
changed how you approach marketing or even product
direction. And bonus points like flurry.
I just want to call out 2014 acquired by Yahoo for a ton of
money. Like, dude, you've you've got a
great track record here. So I think for for founders
(16:36):
listening like there's some Nuggets that I just want to make
sure pay attention. Peter, Peter has seen some
stuff, right. So what what do you what do you
say to like customer gives you an insight that actually makes
its way into the product or marketing strategy?
That's interesting. I mean, look, I part of part of
what first say is I can't pick well, if you've done investing
(16:56):
or joined a bunch of startups, you know, like you kind of know
you're especially with your own work, you're putting putting
your egg in one basket for several years.
So I do try to figure out if theteam, the team has something
right, like, you know, I think it's like, are they going at the
most important things that are they going after the most
interesting market they can and do they have something quote UN
(17:18):
quote disruptive? I like disruptive stuff because
I like to kind of tella here's how things are now.
Here's how things are going to change like the Today, tomorrow
story. So, so the caveat up front is I
am looking for companies trying to take big swings who have
great teams and you know, you don't always know.
I've been at many startups 1 didnot one was like not what I
(17:38):
thought it was. And it was it was it was a mess.
But such as a startup life. Your question, your question
exactly, Jason, was what? It was basically like, how do
you think about breaking through?
The breakthrough. Yeah, taking, you know, signal,
right, like customer signal, user signal in zero to 1 and in
like pulling out an insight and saying, oh, you know what, this
(17:59):
user is telling us something really interesting here.
Let's apply that to the to the go to market, to the product
strategy to how we're talking about this.
If there's something jumps out we can, I'd love to hear.
It. No, no, There's a lot.
There's a lot. I guess I'm thinking about it
because I guess the first thing is I'd say the biggest word, the
biggest single word that I thinkis the most important word,
which is also probably going to be a relief to people dealing
(18:21):
with the question of will AI replace my job?
AI won't replace your job, it'llchange your job.
But empathy is the word that's in my mind.
So what I find, you know, I, Kevin, went to good schools, I
went to good schools. You know, I, I have fancy
degrees. I worked at big companies, But
like a big difference between a good market and a good product
person is an empathy. And so, and what I mean is like,
(18:42):
can you put yourself in the shoes of that customer and like,
what are their, what's their pain?
What's their aspiration? You know, what are the dynamics
like at work for them to make a decision?
How easy are you making it for them to to try you and make a
decision? So like that momentum piece is
really, I think it comes from somehow understanding the
customer really well. Signals come from lots of
(19:04):
places. The best is if you can use the
product yourself, honestly. But I work on a lot of stuff I
can't use, you know, like if I went to cursor, how did that
work for? Us like with accompli, right,
like we had like, you know, we had this sort of product
engineering sort of marketing loop and like I think the nice
thing about emails, we did use the product, right.
But like, you know, does that work today and you're in the
company you're working at today.Like, are you the same kind of
(19:26):
user that you were as an e-mail user?
Well, we had a thesis at Accompli that, you know, people
wanted to get things done and they wanted to, you know, Javier
had a pretty clear story or distilled down into like, you
know, find things easier, right,That kind of thing.
You know, he had he had a list of a few things.
So that thesis was pretty that was pretty well understood and
(19:48):
we were building in that direction and we're getting
positive feedback. In fact, I think you set up,
Kevin, you were particularly good at feedback loops.
I think we were using, we were using, we were getting lots of
feedback from a lot of differentplaces.
How I do it today is we record all our calls, sales calls, and
I listen to a lot of sales callsand I pull transcripts and run
them through ChatGPT. And then I try to separate the
(20:09):
garbage answers from the good answers and, and, and now I'm
doing we have really good impactfor our early set of customers
meeting our stuff really works well.
So now I'm. Doing interviews for case
studies, success stories, and you know, I, that's actually
quite different than a sales call where I walk them through,
(20:29):
you know, I'm trying to extract a story from them, but it's
really a very simple, a problem,solution, results kind of story.
So it's like what we're using before, you know, what made you
decide you needed to fix something?
You know what, what did you lookat?
What did you choose? What was your first experience
like with that? So I'm actually now getting the
benefit of walking people through very carefully and
understanding decision by the buying criteria, substitutes,
(20:52):
alternatives, competition. Again, you know, we're in a
world where people are just kindof doing it themselves.
That's a lot of what we compete against is DIY versus like an
actual established competitor. While the product is technical
today, the one I work on, what we do is actually pretty
straightforward from a value, but we answer questions, we
answer technical questions that users have.
(21:12):
That's kind of basically what. We do.
I love that you're talking to customers and you're listening
to sales calls. Every time I talk to a founder
or a marketing leader or a product or engineering leader
who doesn't do that, I'm like, this company's probably not
going to make it right. And so it just makes my heart
happy to hear to hear that and like it it, it bodes well for
run LLM. You know, you're in this kind of
(21:32):
noisy AI infra market. Can you walk us through the non
scalable experiments, the channels, the messages, the
community hacks that you kind ofthink about and have run in the,
you know, the early days and andwhat did you decide?
Like what was your approach and your framework for deciding on
what, what would I double down on?
What do I kill? What is that kind of North Star
metric That's like, oh man, we. That's it.
(21:54):
I'm looking for it now. I've gone through and reset the
story and have a better version of the website and I'm doing it
again in the background again because not there, it needs to
be. And we are starting to try and
we are driving some organic inbound lead.
So it's AB2B company in the end.And we actually weren't sure.
In fact, in the last several months, we were like, are we
going to be more PLG and having high volume, like just have to
(22:18):
really work on growth and conversion, you know, premium up
sell or are we going to like getto the mid market sooner than we
think, which is actually what's happening.
There's compression. Bigger companies are willing to
adopt AI faster than say they were SAS before this.
I'm finding there's a compression in the market for
demand for this kind of thing. So as far as figuring it out,
like again, I kind of go back toI got some feel for the
(22:42):
customer. Listen, some calls leaning
heavily on the CEO who's, who's like a great guy, like can
really explain things and you know, no ego and just, you know,
we're trying to figure out the story.
And then again, like what's working or what are we trying?
Like I think today we're we, we announced the public beta and
what we did there was not was not dissemble this like a couple
(23:04):
months ago. And that was a good cycle for
us. We basically did the friends and
family outreach to everybody we knew to like.
And unfortunately the company has a very good network of
people who are deep in the spacebecause they come from academia
and they have a ton of like realBallers who are actually doing
this stuff. And so a lot of them, you know,
we wrote like a very a series ofblood.
(23:25):
We had a whole launch week, but we wrote like what would be the
equivalent of a really good press release pushed to our blog
and pushed promoted on social. Social for us is mainly LinkedIn
and and X to an extent, but X has been falling apart as well.
So for us, it's really LinkedIn now.
LinkedIn in the last 18 to 24 months has really become like
the only platform, I think for Bto B for for social, but it is
(23:48):
extremely noisy. You mentioned that especially
for AI stuff. So I think for us when I came
into this company, because there's, there's sounded by two
Cal professors and two PhDs thatcame out of Cal all with heavy
like LLMAI, machine learning, computer science backgrounds,
thought leadership came to mind,right?
Is it this guys are a candidate for thought leadership?
(24:09):
And The thing is founders role at this stage, like is it, you
know, are they the main Blogger?Are they the main salesperson PR
person? Like how do they focus like
their time? Because I'm sure it's limited in
terms of how much they can spendwith marketing versus product or
other things. That's right, That's right.
And this is this all works dovetails in because I can
handle kind of both. I know I'm going on a longer
answer here, but the CEO, the other thing they were candidate
(24:30):
for is founder marketing becausethe CEO and the professor were
right. One of the professors guy named
Joey, Joey and Vikram is our CEO.
So Vikram and Joey have been writing for over a year like a
sub stack weekly blog. They call the AI frontier.
And it's actually a mass. It's separate to our company,
but it's a mass, a pretty good following.
And it's where they just talk about where the state of AI is.
(24:51):
And you know, have we reached toAGI or some concept, right?
So they're just thinking very big and in a cerebral way.
And so that exists already. And so I knew.
So one thing I have to feel out like Javier at was ACEO at
Accompli and he was great in front of people.
And the CEO at hacker one was was more shy and the CTO is more
(25:12):
shy, but they had a lot of the CTO take that credibility with
customers and analyst here. The CEO is, is a really good
balance. His role I would say is he's
product leader and he's founder selling still.
He's at the end of founder selling.
He's we have our first kind of Rep and then I'm pitching in a
little. I'm trying not to pull myself
too out of position, but I'm also selling a little and and
(25:33):
then, you know, he has an engineering background, of
course, but someone else is running engineering and he is
pretty good about like not doingmore than he he should, but he's
doing everything kind of when I joined, it was like, again, I
like accompli actually was I think I was the only person
without ACS degree who wasn't building, who wasn't a maker.
So so you know I. That makes it so that you have
(25:54):
like this unique perspective, though, which is great, right?
Like, I think you you end up coming in and you're you're the
guy who should be looked to as the expert in marketing.
I'd never tell Kevin how to write code or at this point,
tell Devin AI how to write code.But you know, I think it's
similarly like, you know, it's easy for marketers to get sucked
into this trap of, you know, well, everybody's a consumer.
So everybody thinks they know marketing and it's, you know,
(26:15):
being able to establish now hereare the frameworks.
Here's the approach. Here's how we do this.
We're going to do thought leadership and this is how you
do thought leadership, right? This is how we're going to
leverage our CEO and our founder.
And so I want to talk about thisthing that you that you've kind
of talked about on your profile and you mentioned LinkedIn and
like tell me about creative destruction.
What is that? What does that mean to you?
Like give me the pithy, like if I'm a founder and I'm thinking
(26:35):
about my first kind of marketing, go to market, what is
how, how could I leverage Peter's creative destruction?
Yeah, I think it's a play on. I mean, it's a, it's a concept
that now I'm blanking on who came up with it and properly
attribute it. But creative, creative
destruction is the idea that sorry, what am I saying on my
LinkedIn? Because I think I I might have
tweaked that. Yeah.
(26:56):
It's crave destruction. It is crave destruction.
Crave destruction is the original term.
Sorry, I had to, Yeah. It's it's, there's a German word
that I can't pronounce and it's an economic concept, right, that
describes. The process.
Where you innovations replace and make obsolete older
innovations. But I think it applies to
marketing, which is I'm guessingwhere you're taking this.
Yeah, and I think it's because Iwork on, it's the types of
(27:16):
things I choose to work on. And I think I also am putting it
up there because because there is a like like to challenge the
status quo. There's sort of an there's sort
of an irreverence or defiance I have built in as part of my
personality that I try to kind of hide because, you know, like
it doesn't always work in corporate culture.
And I just come out of five years at Yahoo where, you know,
(27:39):
by DNA design, whatever the innovation in entrepreneurship
is not there anymore. It's like been it gets beaten
down pretty hard if you try. So I think for me it was that
idea of getting back to what I really love to do.
It's just like, I love nothing more than to to take a run at a
major incumbent and knock them off.
Like I just like the David versus Goliath story.
(27:59):
And I like, I like the idea. Well, and I like the idea.
And I think when I find Kevin has this people, I work like
there is a, there is a I'm goingto bet on myself.
Yeah. I'm not intimidated by you and
your big company. In fact, you're, you're slow.
You're slow because of it. You have all this legacy
inertia. You can't get out of your own
(28:20):
way. And I'm going to, I'm going to
cut you apart. Just watch.
And I love that idea because it's so the creative destruction
to me is like, it's maybe it's akung fuish type thing, but the
energy is already there. Things are being replaced.
There are cycles of replacement happening all the time.
And incumbents were resisted, ofcourse, because they're trying
to push out their revenue and profit curves.
But, you know, there are there. I, I like it when something new
(28:43):
comes along that can make thingsbetter.
And it sort of can't be denied, but there's going to be
resistance against it for a while just because that's the
way it works. And I like to be the one who
helps. It helps push it through.
So that's a great place to leaveit because that's like, that's
it. You know, you're, you're, you're
David and you're going to, you're going to make the next
thing happen. I love it.
(29:05):
And the tools, the tools, I willsay real quick, the tools, this
is going to help hopefully with an answer.
Before that you might, I don't know if you want to edit this
around, but when I start with a small company, a lot of it's
about managing the budget. So I'm always organic inbound.
So thought leadership, SEO content, those are always the
place to start. If you have thought leadership,
you can accelerate that. Paid media is not going to work
(29:26):
well initially anyway, as you guys know, the way the auction
works and Kevin's actually quitean expert in this.
So, so you can't go into paid media because it's going to be
inefficient and bleed you out. So you have to build up your
brand, your story, your base, your following.
You got to do it with inbound out of the work.
You got to be good at that anyway, because that's kind of
what's available to you and whatcan work and also build a
foundation for the future. I love it.
(29:48):
Peter, where can folks find you and learn more about your work?
Yeah, I think LinkedIn is an easy place to find me and I try
to keep everything up to date. And you can.
That's just Peter Farrago there.And then, you know, I'm on all
the socials. You can also, you know, I'm
promoting a lot of what we're doing in and around AI at my
company. You'll find that you know
through my LinkedIn. It's run LLM.
(30:10):
That's an easy place. To start, awesome brother.
Thanks for coming out and good to see you.
And well, that was Peter Fargo breaking down marketing zero to
1. I mean, huge thanks to Peter for
sharing all the tips and practical insights.
And you know, quite frankly, some more stories from Flurry
and Accompli and you know now what he's doing with Run LLM.
You know, I think hopefully thatgives you a clearer picture of,
you know, where to focus your energy in these, you know, kind
of early days. Like what did you think, Jason?
(30:31):
Yeah, you know, this one is a near and dear to my heart as a
as a career marketing and growthguy.
You know, know your audience, start with a clear understanding
of who they are and your value for them, your value
proposition. There's nothing more important
than that. Next is iterating quickly on the
brand on messaging, whether you start with the clip art logo or
not, get to the right message for that audience and, and get
(30:53):
there quickly. In doing so, you probably will
use customer feedback loop. So you know, understanding the
customer and then using that to improve the product and the
storytelling. Peter's listening to sales calls
that matters, right? He understands the customer
deeply. And then focus on organic
inbound and thought leadership before paid.
This is especially relevant in in a situation like Peter's
(31:15):
where you're doing B to B marketing.
You have larger customers and longer sales cycles.
And so you you want to make surethat you've got a system that
works before you spend a bunch of money on ads.
So that that for me was the big stuff.
I jumped out. I hope you found it useful.
If you liked the episode, pleasegive us a like and subscribe.
Share it with the founder that'swrestling with their initial
marketing strategy. And we'll be back next time with
another deep dive into this founder journey.
(31:35):
Awesome. Thanks again for listening to
Founder Mode. Remember, in the beginning it's
not about complex funnels, it's about finding those first
believers.
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