Guk Kim on Running Experiments in Corporates and Minset

In our latest podcast episode, I had the privilege of sitting down with Guk Kim, a seasoned professional with an impressive background in growth marketing.

Having worked for prominent companies such as LastMinute.com, Zomato, and Citymapper, Guk brings a wealth of experience in driving growth and innovation in both startup and corporate environments.

During this enlightening conversation, Guk Kim delved into the fascinating nuances that distinguish startups from established corporations.

One of the key topics of our discussion revolved around running experiments in large organizations. Guk Kim, being an expert in this field, shared his tried-and-tested methods for effectively implementing and measuring the impact of experiments within big companies.

If you're an entrepreneur, marketer, or simply curious about the inner workings of growth marketing in different contexts, this episode is a must-listen.

Listen to the full episode now and discover the strategies that can revolutionize your approach to growth marketing!

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🛠 Suggested tools:
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https://slack.com/

👍 Follow our guest here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gukkim/

🧲 Watch my free lead generation course:
https://gaito.link/skillshare

🤖 Watch my free ChatGPT course:
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🙏 Subscribe to the channel:
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📚 Download the Reading List:
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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Show everyone, and welcome back toGrowth Talks. I'm your host Rao and
my super guest today is good Kim. How are you man? All good?
All good? Thanks for having mehere. A failure. It's a
pleasure. It's a pleasure. It'sit's it's a pleasure having you today here.
Um. We know we've been weknow each other for a while now,

(00:21):
um, and I really wanted todo an episode with you because I'd
love to have some you know,feedback and and you know and experience and
then suggestions, uh, when talkingabout growth in a you know, big
environment, in a big corporate ina big company. But let's start from
the beginning. So we usually start, you know, these conversations on this

(00:42):
podcast, just with a classic one, with a simple one. So let's
talk a little bit about yourself.What's your story? Perfect? Thanks?
So, I mean, so,my name is good. I don't look
like one, but actually I'm fromInfo. I'm Italian, I will say,
because I've been living in Italy sincei was five years old, or

(01:02):
even I'm from Korea. But giventhe fact that I've lived most of my
life in here in Italy, Iconsidered myself Italian and so on. I
also, I mean, I stilllike Korean food and all that stuff,
but I still consider myself Italian.Whenever I go to Asia, I'm like,
Okay, where is my home?My homies in Italy and so right,
my career in the industry is slightlydifferent or slightly inverseed from the many

(01:25):
of the people. So rather thanstarting the corporate life since the beginning after
university, I actually opened my owncompany. So I did my own startups.
So when I was in high school, when the idea of what is
the growth marketing, what is astartup? What is ABC? What is
venture capital? All these kind ofthings was still very unknown in the industry
or in the at my age,Like I mean, I didn't even know

(01:48):
what this words meant, and soso I had to google in myself.
We didn't have GPT by it then, by the way, so it was
just Google and all that stuff.So I had an inverse role. So
I was an entrepreneur. And thenafterwards I decided to work for some scale
ups. I worked at Somato anda city mapper. Those two companies really
taught me a lot about how abig startup because at the end this companies

(02:08):
decided to acquire my companies there,and I worked very closely with the entrepreneurs
there. But afterwards, I think, you know an opportunity camp, which
was to work for a corporation Lastmadot com. I was actually very scared
to accept the job because when theyproposed it to me and they were telling
me, hey, you know,when you come here, you don't have
to think about growing users or usageor whatever. You actually have to think

(02:30):
about how to make money. Youhave to actually make money. You have
a budgets to hit, and youneed to get there. While I was
at my company, or when Iwas in city Map or in Somato,
was all about hey, user metrics, how many users do we get?
How much traffic are we getting?Are we putting out articles out there for
SEO and all that stuff, right, But here in last Man dot com

(02:51):
was all about revenue. You growrevenues, revenues pay for salaries, not
the users and all the stuff.Right. So it was quite a rage
for me at the beginning. Butalso I was quite worried in the beginning
because while I was working at myown company or Zomat or Cinema Purn,
you knew the kind of effect youcould have within the company. You knew

(03:12):
that if you did something, youcould basically move the company trajectory in some
ways, shape or form. Butin a corporation of over one thousand employees
across different offices in Europe, Ithought that would be very difficult. But
I decided to take the challenge anyway, and I'm quite happy. So very
recently I decided to leave the company. In the organization, I was a

(03:32):
chief operning officer until the end ofApril. Today I'm out. I'm trying
to enjoy my life a bit morebefore I understanding what to do. Maybe
I'm thinking of doing something my ownco inverse, go back to the original.
You know all these goods, somaybe I would want to go back
there. But definitely I'm glad aboutall the things that I've learned on Last
minute dot com, and I'm happyto share more afterwards. I think the

(03:55):
best part of your story is thereyou have had experiences there are different from
each other. So you started witha startup, and then you move to
some scale ups and then you knowa big company. What would you say,
what are the main differences in youknow, these three kind of companies
in terms of growth and the ideaof doing you know, growth marketing inside

(04:18):
all of them. Maybe you alreadytold us one and it's the meaning of
the word growth. Uh. Youknow, in some cases they mean you
know, users growth. In bigcompanies they mean, you know, mostly
revenue growth. But apart from that, what are the main differences in doing

(04:39):
you know, growth marketing in threedifferent environments? So I would say one
thing that I've noticed is that frommy own startups. Maybe maybe it's because
your own startups, maybe it's becauseyour own money and all that stuff,
you always think about how to growfor free. So I would say my
specialization was more on the side offinding ways to acquire traffic for free or

(05:02):
for using very small amount of moneyto get there. So SEO was one
of the things that I've worked ona lot. You know, finding ways
to show up as a first resultin Google was something very important, especially
for at the time. I usedto have websites or companies where I needed
to have usage as much usage aspossible to in order to sell the traffic

(05:24):
to advertisers on other other companies outthere. So that's one thing that I've
learned a lot, and that's whereI started studying you know, all this
kind of case studies. You wouldhear a lot about how hotmail became so
big because they put a small linkreferral links and their emails and all that
stuff. No, so we didthat a lot. I learned a lot
of that there when I started workingat scale ups instead. I mean,

(05:45):
there was part of the you know, let's find ways to acquire traffic for
free. But because these companies weretypically had a lot of resources on a
venture capital funding, what I've seenis that marketing budget was almost infinite,
and you wouldn't even think about optimizeinto the nearest scent, how to optimize
each campaign, you know, theROI and all those kind of tracking points.

(06:06):
So it wasn't I would say,it was more about, hey,
let's throw money at the problem.Let's find a ways to acquire as much
traffic as possible, because all wecare about is getting as many users as
possible. In fact, many scaleups, as you've seen, as you
can see, are not profitable,I would say, because all they're doing
is they're investing for the future growthof the company. There. Then when
I joined the corporation, like lastmaerdot com actually super sophisticated I've never seen

(06:30):
such sophistication in the paid marketing sideof the things. Of course, there's
always the SEO aspect, there's alwaysthe email newsletters and those kind of things,
but I would say it's a secondaryaspect. It's more about finding ways
to ensure that the paid marketing isworking in an efficient way and making sure
that it's actually profitable channels, andthen you will try to segment each of
the channels to ensure that each channelis a profitable channel, rather than blending

(06:54):
it all together. So the differencebetween a scale up and a corporation is
that while the scale ups they're like, Okay, let's do it blended and
all blended customer acquisition cost, ina corporation it would be no, no,
this specific channel would have its owncost of acquisition cost click sorry,
yeah, cost of acquisition and allthese things. Right, So it was

(07:16):
very a lot more sophysical on theother side because each year really counted for
for the company, basically for thecompany's bottom line. M So it means
that there are huge differences in termsof strategies, but also in terms of
you know, tactics and the dayto day work that you do on on
the world side. I would sayon a corporation, it's a I felt

(07:40):
like sometimes we were too sophisticated.Sometimes you were really trying to split the
hair in a half. Many times, while in a scale up it would
be more, okay, let's justthrow let's do it, let's try things
out and see what sticks around.While while in a corporation everything isn't been
more because you have to justify,right, you have to just to the
poor, you have to justify toyour CEO while you're spending this money,

(08:03):
and then you will look at thatthose numbers every single day in ensuring that
it is quite profitable. We're talkingabout that you're spending hundreds of thousands of
years on a daily basis, soif you do a mistake, you can
see it right way and based onthat. What's the let's say, the
hardest part of doing growth in ayou know, bigger company, apart from

(08:26):
you know, have to justify everythingyou do. But is there any you
know, things that you could say. It's kind of more difficult, you
know, in a bigger company insteadof startup or a scale up. So
I give you an example, andit's quite an interesting example. So as

(08:48):
you know I come from a startupbackground, and when I joined the Last
Mater dot com, I had toadapt my way of doing things and so
on. I have to say Iwas lucky compared to other people because I
knew the founders of the company.I knew to see. Although I wasn't
directly reporting to the CEO at thetime, I did have a direct connection
with the CEO and so on,right, so I had more freedom of

(09:11):
management or operating aspect within the company. So I could do things that maybe
some other people would have had moredifficulty to do, so take bets and
so on. So one of thethings that I've noticed is that, for
example, you know what I wasworking in Last Man, one of my
responsibilities was to grow the insurance revenue. So how many how much insurance they
sell to the customers? Was thepricing and those things right? And the

(09:31):
first things that came to my mindat the time was that, Hey,
the best way of understanding how toincrease the sales of insurance maybe is we
should work on the copywriting. Becausewe had a tool, because we had
the back office system. The bestway was, Hey, maybe you know,
if we talk about different kind ofbenefits that insurance policy provides, maybe
the customers will decide to buy morerather than saying, hey, you get

(09:52):
like, I don't know, fivethousand a year old par cancelation reimbursement and
stuff. So the idea was toldteam, Hey, guys, I think
we should come up with different copywritingto do this. The first thing they
told me is that, hey,but there is a department that does copywriting.
You cannot just randomly start writing copywritingyourself. Like, guys, I
mean, let's just open the PDFfile of the insurance policy. Let's study.

(10:15):
Yet, maybe there are some benefitswithin the insurance policy, and there
are many many people don't know thatthere are more than whatever we've writen in
the models and so on. Let'scome up with that. They were like,
okay, good, but are yousure because this is not something that
we were allowed to do. We'rejust business people, we're just business analysts.
We're not allowed to change the copyof the product without a copywriting team,
So we should go to the CPO, which at the time the copywriting

(10:37):
team reported into, right, andthen afterwards they were like, okay,
but we also need to go tothe legal team because whenever you change something
on a highly regular product, suchas an insurance you need to go to
a legal team and you need toget approval. After the legal team has
approved of whatever copywriting you want todo, you need to send that to
the insurance provider, to our supplieras well. And I'm like, okay,

(11:00):
but how long does this process stick? Because I want to test things
out quickly because I have a budgetto hit within this year and it's already
I don't know, February March,and if we didn't do it right away,
we're not going to hit the budget. Right. So this whole process
was funny because we came up witha good copy I think at the time
I thought that at the time wasa good copy. We sent it to
the legal team. It took them, let's say, three to four weeks
because obviously they're quite busy with theother aspects of the business and so on,

(11:24):
to come back and say, hey, we made some changes to this
copywriting and so on, I thinknow this is acceptable. We saw like,
okay, it's okay. I wouldsay, maybe there's too still too
much legal lease in there, andso on, let's send it to our
supplier. We sent it to oursupplier after one month. They came back
and said, Okay, no,this is not the right way of doing

(11:45):
this. Please go back to theprevious thing. So I'm like, okay,
I lost two months of the timeand we didn't receive anything. Like
we didn't we didn't get to changemuch about the copywriting, the original copywriting
of the insurance policy. I waslike, you know what, let's make
our changes our elms, right,So let's do something that actually we're not
allowed to do. Let's find asmall segmentation of the traffic. Because the

(12:07):
lucky thing that I had when you'reincorporation is that you have a lot of
traffic and you can segment the trafficand start playing with things without getting caught
right away. So I told theguys, hey, let's do the copywriting
ourselves. Let's not involved the copywritingteams or the legal teams or whatever.
And so let's you know, starttesting things out. Let's make sure that
we're within the rules, the regulatoryframeworks. And so it's not like we're

(12:30):
going to make thick promises or anything. We just think, hey, if
we think that this benefit of theinsurance policy makes sense, let's promote that.
Don't invent new things don't do anythinglegal whatever and so on. Right,
So we started doing this and thenobviously we found the like several copywriting
aspects of that that worked really well. So once we found that, we

(12:50):
went to the legal team and thenask the legal team, hey, what
do you think about this, becausewe tested it already and we saw that,
you know, it's very good.What do you think happens? They
said, no, exactly, Well, they went they went to the CEO.
They started complaining they'd been a hugemeeting and so on. Hey,
why is this small team the businessanalysts, the business team is overstepping on

(13:13):
other departments. Why is Goog's teamworking on the copywriting for insurance that should
be done by the copywriting team.Why are these people changing the copywriting of
an insurance without first getting approval fromthe insurance, from the legal team and
so on, right, Or whythey're doing it without doing it with the
suppliers and so on. So thatwas the kind of complexity that I had

(13:35):
to deal with within a huge corporationwhere everyone had their own job or specialized
in their own job, and ifyou were doing other people's jobs, and
of course they would start thinking,hey, you're trying to take away.
I don't know their responsibilities and allthat stuff. And I think in a
corporation that is the hardest thing,while when you're in a startup or in
a scale up, that is expected. That is something that is expected that

(13:58):
you do that. Because there wasalways this kind of idea, don't ask
for permission, ask for forgiveness,right, And I applied that within the
corporation, but not always. It'sa it's a cultural mantra that many people
enjoy or likely And I mean,I get it makes sense. You know,
to you have to get approval.You know that the whole process is

(14:22):
kind of you know, long andcomplex and involves so many people. But
so what's the what would you say? What's the solution to that? So,
for example, if someone is listeningand they're work in a big company
and they have a you know,the same problem or kind of same scenario,
same situation, how would you addressthat? So do you think this

(14:45):
means that you have to change theway you do experiments? You have to
change you know, the internal processesof approval. Uh, you have to
change teams? How does it work? How do you fix that? It's
very difficult and I don't think wesolved that within the within the company when
last dot Com, even even whenI became the chief oputting officer of the

(15:09):
company, where I would say Ihad the major controls and major responsibilities they
are, but you still had to, you know, deal with with the
other executives within the team and makingsure that you're all aligned and so on.
And at some point, the higheryou go up, the less you
want to end up in political battlesand you tend to adapt to the internal
rules or the internal processes. IfI can give a suggestion to the CEOs

(15:35):
in general, I think you needto find the people that are like that.
Maybe you know the kind of peoplethat don't want to ask for permission,
but they want to ask for forgivenessafterwards, and I think you need
to cherish them. I think youneed to protect them within the organization because
they're the ones that potentially can findin an unfair competitiveness something that other competitors

(15:58):
will not do. Because most ofthe people, most of the companies typically
they want to follow the flow.They don't want to do something big,
something crazy, and so on,because if you think about it, when
you're a startup, you have nothingto lose. But when you're a corporation,
you have a lot to lose.You you have a lot to lose
because you have an established company.You have a company with historian so,

(16:21):
and you have revenue lines, youhave you know, profits and all that
stuff, and you don't want torisk that too much. But I think
having a small team that is alwaysin an exploration mode, or a small
team that keeps breaking the status quoover the company can put an edge to
the company. Can put can putmost of the people in the organization up

(16:42):
to their toasts that they always needto deliver. They always they need to
be on the edge, right,They would be on their edge because they
would think, why is this guydoing my job? Is it doing actually
better than me or in copywriting,or is it better than me coming up
with processes and so on? Right, So I think you need to cherish
them somehow. On the other side, for the person that is actually challenging

(17:03):
the status quo ands on, youneed to understand that you're taking risks and
you need to be sure about that, and you need to be ready that
maybe they will not ask give youforgiveness, maybe they will just tell you,
hey, you're not working out forthe for the organization, right,
you need to get out of theorganization, and I think you need to
be able to accept that. Soit's a it's a double sweat, uh,

(17:25):
you know edge this word. It'snot easy to say. I don't
think it's an easy problem to solve, but I think the risks are worth
it, especially because in a sucha high competitive world, you know,
like the travel industry for example,you need to find an affair advantage of
against your competitors, and the onlyway to do that is that like to

(17:45):
find new ways to go in explorationmode. I love this expression you used
a few times today, exploration mode. What do you mean by that?
So what does a team actually doif they are in exploration mode? So

(18:06):
let's take the insurance as an example, right, as an exploration we think,
like sometimes we all have like apreconception of what works and what doesn't
work and so on. But whatI've noticed, what I've learned from last
minute my experience there, is thatwhatever I learned in the past does not
apply easily into the thing. Right. You may think, hey, if

(18:26):
you make this bottom look nicer,if you make this mode look nicer,
if you have better designers. Ifyou have better UI UX or whatever and
so on, you can improve theconversion rates. It didn't work that way.
I mean even you know, likeI always said, I want beautiful
things. I wanted to my websiteto look beautiful. I wanted the app
to look beautiful and so on.But is it are you actually doing that

(18:48):
for the user or are you doingit for yourself? And I think what
I've learned is that actually the reasonwhy I wanted the beautiful website or a
beautiful app is for myself, notfor the user. Because of what I've
noticed always is at the conversion webarely moved, is that because I made
something look nicer, the conversion ithas become much much better. Typically uglier
designs or things that we would considerugly I actually work much better than nicer

(19:12):
apple like looking kind of websites.And so also, this is something that
I've learned. But when I saygoing exploration mode is that we don't know
what we need to do, sowe just need to test things out.
So the lucky thing that I had, as I mentioned before, is that
when you're work in a corporation,typically you haven't established business. Typically you

(19:32):
haven't established traffic traffic sources, sopeople are always coming to you, right.
And one of the things that Ikept on saying to my team,
guys were so lucky here because whileI was in startups, every day was
a new day and I had tofigure out how to bring in customers to
the website or users to the website. Here, if I go sleep,
if I don't work tomorrow, ifI wouldn't work today or whatever, and

(19:53):
so in any way, we willhave tens of thousands of customers coming to
our website or to our app,giving us their credit cards and actually buying
something onto our portals. Even ifI go away for one month, tens
of thousands of customs will always comeon a daily basis to do something on
our website and buy stuff. Andthat was the beauty of it, right.

(20:15):
And what this means is that youcan actually segment to traffic as much
as possible while in a startup.Is very difficult to do because the traffic
numbers are solow and in order toget the statistical relevance is very difficult.
So I just saw the guy getthe guys there, the business analysts,
not even the copywriters there at thetime. So look, I'm going to
give you a single KPI every day. I don't care what you do.

(20:36):
Just launch a new experiment, geta small segment of traffic, just launch
a new copywriting experiment. There youcome up with it. Just follow the
common sense rules to analyze that thecustomers. Do not do anything that sounds
illegal or whatever, and so no, just do whatever you think is the
best thing, one at a time, sorry, one a day. And

(20:59):
this guy would all he was doingwas actually studying a lot of the PDF
files, so really learning really wellthe insurance policy there. And it's many
pages, like thirty forty pages.I don't know, I don't think there's
any single person out there, anycustomer out there Dabas Insurance that have read
the whole thing. But we didjust to really learn the really well the
product that we're selling. And sono, and we started doing that and

(21:22):
so on, and after some timeyou would actually start saying, hey,
this works better than the other stuff, which we didn't expect it would work.
So that's what we started doing andthat was the thing that worked out
really well. But in order todo that, unfortunately, sometimes you're going
against the internal processes and that wassometimes the biggest battle that I had personally

(21:42):
internally was to actually deal with theinternal issues because people would say, but
why are you doing my job,and they wouldn't see speed as something very
important, while for me, speedwas everything. To test things out as
much as possible. So that's whatI mean by exploration. We don't know
where we going. We just needto try things out. Let's not have

(22:02):
the preconception that this is going towork better than something else. Let's just
try even the end. Typically,the best ideas always come from like random
discussions that you have, and manytimes they sound very stupid at the beginning,
but those are the best ideas.I cannot make specific examples here,
but really the best ideas are likerandom stuff that happens sometimes maybe even during

(22:27):
the weekend, someone writes in theirslack channel or whatever. Hey, I
think this is like a thing,and someone always say it sounds very stupid,
but then you start thinking about it. Actually that's a smart idea.
Let's try it on Monday. Andthose were the best best things that came
out. If you are enjoying thisepisode, please check out my lead generation
course. You can watch it forfree on guideo dodd Link slash skill Share

(22:49):
Gaio. As an entrepreneur, marketeror business owner, you know how crucial
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tactics for lead generation in both Bto B and B two C markets.
You can watch it for free onguide dot link slash skill Share. G

(23:10):
Ai t Oh. You'll find thelink in the description. You were talking
about speed, and I also thinkthat you know there is something important in
what you just said. That is, if you want to do you know,
UM, if you want to runexperiments, something that is quite important
is quantity. I think we don'ttalk too much about it because maybe quantity

(23:36):
is kind of you know, underrated. Sounds cool to talk about quality all
the time, but in terms ofyou know, running experiments, quantity is
something quite important. I mean,since it's totally random, you don't know
what it's going to work and whatit's not. The more the better,
the right. I suppose this isalso true in a startup. In a

(23:56):
scale up, so um, whenI took over the product organization while I
was at last mail dot com.Obviously I had also like internal struggles as
well to commiss It's not like Iwould impost certain things to the teams.
I think the best way of managementis to you try to push people towards
a direction without really pushing them,right, So you have to nudge them

(24:18):
in a nice ways and so on. So that was also like a huge
difference between like a startup founder andthe working in a corporation. Although like
you have like an important job titleor whatever, it doesn't matter. You
cannot go there and command and controland tell people here a fairly do this,
do that and so on, right, you cannot do that. So
one of the internal struggles and thedebates that I used to have a lot
there at the company was personally andI will tell you it's it's maybe not

(24:45):
nice to say I don't really believein the user research and a lot of
research kind of activities that gets donebefore right, because I kept on telling
to the people, hey, guys, we don't know what's going to work,
okay, And there is you know, even that the famous quote from
Harry or that will say, hey, if people wanted, they would probably
ask for a faster horse rather thanan actual currents on. So okay,

(25:07):
user research is important to a certainextent, and there were times that,
you know, I found it veryuseful, especially in the beginning when you
need to learn the industry. Butat some point it's just better. You
just don't know. Like if ifI ask people, hey, how should
we make our website the nicer soyou convert even more to buy flights,
it's like they're going to give you, like a very useful answer for that
and so on. So I alwaystold them for me, it's like,

(25:33):
I want options, Like I wantto be able to tell to the developers
and to the to the teams.Let's try to try as many things as
possible in a given year so wecan see which one sticks. Yes,
we could say that it's quite wastefulas a strategy, but many times I've
found out that, you know,we will spend three months or four months
doing research, research, research,Then we tried that thing, so it

(25:56):
would take another three months to developthe MVP. Then you launch and doesn't
work at all, and there wouldbe like hundreds of people doing analysis and
so on and so on. Tomake sure that, you know, we
would give to the executive team thekind of information that they need in order
to make the proper assessment and properdecisions. But many times they were like
two three instances where we worked onsix months literally to do analysis and use

(26:18):
the research and all that stuff,and then another three four months to actually
get the development done and to puta live and it didn't work out.
And I always thought that was likesuch a huge waste of resources and huge
waste of time because I was thinkingjust to myself, how many hours I
had to spend personally to ved throughall the data, read through the data
and make it nice enough that youcan be present to do our CEO and

(26:41):
so on. Not So I thinkit's always better to find speed, you
know, break things, just doit, just try it. What's the
worst thing that can happen? Youwere verse back and you try something new.
So I would rather keep doing thatrather than trying to have as much
data as possible to make sure thatthings are working out. And many times
I believe that it's a cultural issuein many teams, in many organization that

(27:06):
people don't want to take the responsibilitywhen things go bad. So that's why
people are sometimes very obsessed in makingsure that they do as much research as
possible, to get as much evidenceas possible, to be able to have
an alibi probably possibly at the endof the journey is saying, hey,
but you know, the user datatold us all this stuff, but it
didn't work out, So it's notmy fault, right, it's not my

(27:30):
responsibility. But instead what I usedto tell my teams my people, I
were like, look, I don'tcare about your mistakes. I'm actually happy
because we know that that is thewrong way. At least we tried it
already. We spent very little onthat to figure that answer out. Let's
move on to the next thing.But I think people have difficulty in that
figuring that out. And also maybeit's possible that some people are more happy

(27:53):
about the process rather than the endresult. So I've seen there are some
people organization that where I'm seeing thatpeople love the process, the idea of
doing the use of research, theidea of doing all these things altogether,
working together as the teams, andall that stuff, and many times they
tend to forget the end result.But one thing that I keep tending to
everyone, Yes, the process isimportant, it's interesting and all the stuff,

(28:17):
but what's really important is that ifthe result is not there, we
failed. We wasted this amount.So we need to make sure that we
try to get there as quickly aspossible as a result to see what works,
because at the end of the day, that is the one that will
either make us successful or not assuccessful. I love this idea, and

(28:37):
I think I agree with you thatyou know, there is if you really
want to do, if you reallywant to run experiments in a company,
you need to work a lot ofyou know, the culture, that the
mindset that is important. This isas important as the you know, the
tools and the strategies and the techniquesand everything else. And I see with

(29:00):
my clients as well, this isprobably the hardest part. In some companies.
You can give them, you know, the tools, you can tell
them about the strategies you know andeverything else, explain the funnels and you
know and loops. But if theyare kind of you know, worried and
scared about you know, failing,it's not gonna work. Just not gonna

(29:22):
work. But that that was theI'm telling you, Like, once you
become an executive over corporation, that'swhat I had to deal with all the
time. Like just changing the culturalmindset is very difficult. But also dealing
with your peers and making them acceptthat Hey, we should allow people to
make mistakes. We should make thempeople believe that, you know, making

(29:45):
those mistakes is not a problem,is not determental to their careers as well.
I've done so many mistakes at lastNight dot Com. But I think
the reason why I got promoted wasbecause I brought the results at the end
of the day. And people tendto forget the stakes that you've done in
the past just because they look atthe results. I mean, if the
revenue line or whatever line that you'reor whatever KP either you're following in a

(30:07):
positive way, it grows, itmeans that you're doing a fantastic job.
Yeah, because part of that process. Yeah, I think it's part of
the process. That's the hard partto understand for many people that you know,
sometimes failure is the only way togrowth. I mean, there is
no other way. You fail,you learn and you grow. But the
most important thing is that you doit. You do it as quickly as

(30:30):
possible. You get to fulfill yourpoint as quickly as possible. And obviously
what's important is that people understand thatthey've failed and they learn from those mistakes
and then apply those uh the lessonsto the new to the new experiments that
they want to do. Mum,I was thinking, last time we saw
each other, we went for acoffee, you told me something that I

(30:52):
loved it. You said, Um, in the whole you know, growth
marketing environment, there is a lotof um, a lot of cool things
that are you know, very coolon theoretical, like on books, but
they don't actually work on you know, in real scenarios. So there are
many people that you know, theyjust read books and you know, blog

(31:15):
posts that they think they know stuff. Then they when they have to work
on it, it actually doesn't worklike that. And I strongly agree with
you. And also, you know, there is a lot of fluff around
it, the whole growth marketing scenario. Um, can you give me a
couple of examples something that you wouldsay, you know, you're tested in

(31:38):
real life. For example, yousaid before you know sometimes ugly websites they
work better than you know, thenice ones. Do you have any examples
of something that you know looks coolon theory, but then you know once
you work on it, it's kindof very hard or difficult or it doesn't
work. I don't so so Ithink, like you know, I mean,

(32:00):
I've seen some people within the withproper job titles like you know,
I'm the growth person within the organization, I'm this and that and so on.
What I've seen is that they tendto read a lot of the blog
posts, they tend to buy alot of books about this and so on,
and they make the examples like Ijust made before, about hey,

(32:21):
we just need to put a linkon the hotmail, then in the signature
and then it's done right. Orif we provide five dollars referral link to
the people, they will start invitingeveryone else within the within their family and
friends or whatever and so on.So I used to hear these kind of
things when we're having discussions with theteams, and I'm like, but you
know, it's very it's too simplistic. I mean, you've gotten that from
one of the I don't know,LinkedIn profiles, or someone posted something on

(32:44):
Twitter and those kind of things,and it really, my opinion, it's
too naive sometimes to think that way. And another thing that I've noticed for
many people is that and I mentionedthis before, they enjoy the process they
injured. I don't think they areafter really liked that idea. I found

(33:06):
a treasure because at the end ofthe day, the growth marketing, it's
about finding something exploiting some area thatnot many people have done already. Right
in any any any marketing channel.At end of the day, there is
like a plateau. You grow veryfast and that at some point it stops
working. I mean you see thatwith all you know, Facebook campaigns or

(33:27):
any campaign and even in art copy, at some point it stops plateauing and
so on. So many people failto recognize that they need to find something
that others are not doing or theconsumers are not used to. So you
can really exploit that as much aspossible. So many people are stick stuck
to the to the process and soon. And maybe an example that I
can give is the use of abtesting. So and I remember this one,

(33:53):
and I mean there are a fewanctors that I can I can say
about about ab testing and so on. So as you know, as I
mentioned before, I love to havea good design. It could looking website.
Maybe I'm doing it for myself,maybe the consumer, but probably maybe
it was for myself looking looking back, and so not because I wanted to
be able to say to my friendslike you and look at what a beautiful
website that we have, a beautifulapp that we have and so no.

(34:16):
So one of the times that wedidn't a be testing was that they didn't
a be testing with a new designand all design. And at the end
of the day, the ab testingshowed that actually they were like no differences,
like, you know, everything wasfifty to fifty. Everything was quite
stable. So they let that andthe team afterwards they told me, no,
we kept all design. We didn'tgive it all design the new design.

(34:36):
And so I'm like, but whydid you do that? It's because
the new design didn't improve so much, said, but why don't you just
use a new design? I mean, if there were no changes, isn't
it better to actually have something thatlooks nicer and all that stuff. Now,
that was the first instance, butthey were like, the but the
process tells us that if there isno improvement on the new design, we
should always keep the old one.So I'm like, guys, but this

(34:57):
is the reason why our website lookslike that they're the nineties instead of you
know, recent and so on.So that and that was the kind of
an answer that I used to receivefrom from from the people that I was
like, I was a bit shockedabout that. I mean, I was
like, but it's even good thatyou have a new design that looks much
nicer and so on, and there'sno impact on the on the conversial rates
and all this on the performance,So you usually keep the new design,
right, if you have a nicerlooking car that consumes exactly the moment as

(35:21):
your previous card that you liked andso on, I would rather have a
nice looking car than in all thelooking car and so on. And then
the other thing was ab testing itself, because people make it very simplistic.
Hey, you just put an optimizedthey put it whatever. Just do an
a by test and you will getthe numbers and so on. But what
people feel people fail to realize isthat doing a B testing, I don't

(35:45):
know, it's more of like anart than a science, because being able
to split the trastic equally by fiftypercent is not as easy as it sounds.
So for last minute, for example, right a user that searches from
Milan to Milan to Bangkok six monthsahead to a user that is searching from

(36:09):
Miland to London for tomorrow, they'recompletely two different users. So the person
that is buying looking for a flightto go from Inland to London tomorrow.
Their intention is very high that theyprobably have to really travel to London tomorrow.
The commercial rate for that is probablynear one hundred percent. The commercial

(36:30):
rate of someone that is looking toque from Milan to Bangkok six months ahead
is probably just shopping around. Sowhat do you do. You start segmenting
this kind of trafficence on or thiskind of searches. But when you start
segmenting this kind of searches, youraudience gets smaller and smaller and smaller,
and you will never hit statistical significance. It's impossible. So we also threw

(36:52):
like, you know, data scientistsinto the problem. They were trying to
find ways to split the traffic correctlyand all that stuff. So and then
that's where the statistics comes in whatI was saying, you know, in
a corporation, then you really startedbecoming very sophisticated because you start spulling the
hair in half and so on,to the point where sometimes it's so crazy.
And this is a trap that Ifell in as well, because I

(37:14):
would ask our analysts to really deepdive and really understand and so on.
But at the end of the day. What I realized actually, and this
is something that many people in thein the company didn't agree with me,
was hey, let's just to beforeand after. Who cares about to be
testing? And that was like blasphemyright within the within the product, like
what what are you doing? Likeyou wanted to be fun after it?

(37:37):
That is like so elemental right asI think we were taught from everyone everywhere,
from all the marketings in the worldthat you always need to be testing,
just to be for and after.At our level of sophistication, you
wanted to just be for an after. They all thought that was crazy,
But I have to say, likeeven today, I still think that sometimes
just doing before and after it's justthe best way to go. And the

(38:00):
one thing that I've told the guysas well is when you're doing any detesting,
or when you're doing any before afterand so on, if you don't
see an increase of at least doubledigits, like ten percent, anything below
is just noise. You were justlucky that you know, during that time,
maybe there is a weekly sysonality effector whatever, something has happened that's
why the numbers have gone up.But when they were coming with the ab

(38:21):
testing with the results showing hey,the B version is better by one point
two percent, and you're like,what are you talking about the absolute value
or is it the difference? It'sjust a difference, but that is just
noise. Yeah, but good,But we hit the statistical signific as we
have only already like over one hundredthousand views on this one, so it's
probably like true. Then you wouldsplit like and then you would like release
that one hundred percent with traffic,and then over time you will see that

(38:44):
actually the the you know, thewhatever performance keepay that you're tracking is quite
flat over the years. And anotherthing is that, hey, you know
when you do the krs and soon, you will give to your product
teams, Hey, you need toimprove the conversion rate by ten percent by
the end of the year if youwant to get your bonuses, thence on.
What people don't realize is the conversionrates. It's very tough to improve

(39:07):
the conversion rate with an established designbecause I found so many ways just by
controlling the prices or the markups tomove to move the commercial rates. So
all these OKRs, you know,we've read so many books about Google doing
these OKRs in a beautiful way everythree months or whatever, and so on.

(39:27):
So difficult, like so much taxonto the executive teams and the leadershi
between the managers and so on togive all these like partay settings to the
people. And then many times wewill never be able to really understand how
to tell to the product people thatwere working on the let's say, to
check out commercial rate if they weredoing a fantastic job or not, and
if they deserve the bonus or notfor hitting their targets. Because many times

(39:50):
it was the pricing team or thecommercial team that with their commercial strategies that
were moving around the commercial rate ofthe product. So there was it was
it's very difficult to do. Sothat's why all these books that you read
and so on and that you're playingin your life, it's very difficult to
do. And I see that manyexecutives do that as well. I mean

(40:12):
they say, hey, let's justput an kyard. Let's tell the growth
marketing guy, hey, they needto do I don't know, twenty percent
more increase. Not that easy evento track that and to verify what I
usually see, especially with young people, as you said, you know,
they read books about growth and youknow, and you know from marketing Google's

(40:35):
probably sometimes the hard part is tounderstand that, you know, the book
is not a recipe you can accopy paste you know, something that someone
said and you do exactly something inyour own company. You have to be
able to read the room, tounderstand the context to kind of you know,
adapt the Yes, that's the thing. You always be able to adapt
the framework to the company and notthe other way around. And this is

(40:59):
not just for growth. I thinkthis is for okayr. This is for
you know, agile and scrum,everything you want to try in your company.
Sometimes they read the book and theythink, oh, this is the
recipe. You know, those arethe five steps. We have to do
exactly the same in our company,and that's quite impossible. Maybe the hard
part is be able to adapt theframework to the company and make it work.

(41:22):
And that is very hard. Thatis very hard. It is you
know, it's it's not as simpleas getting an Ikea manual to build the
furniture, because every person that readsa manual they interpreted in a different way.
And you know, while I wasat Latman dot com, we're really
studying a lot of organizational structures withinthe company. How to let the product

(41:45):
teams and the technology teams work together. What are the ceremonies that they need
to have together, How do youinvolve the marketing team in there, how
they involve the growth team in there, how they involve the BI teams in
there, How to involve the businessteams in there? Super super difficult.
And then what I really felt liketowards towards the end of my career in
lastment dot com was actually I becamean organizational architect because my whole point was

(42:12):
how do I make people work together? Teams worked together in order to ensure
that the company keeps them growing andthey're focus and working on the right thing.
Was good lessons, A lot ofgood lessons there. Definitely, Well,
speaking of lessons, since you havethese, you know, um,
as we said before, very differentexperiences in startup, scale ups and incorporate,

(42:36):
what would you say are the youknow, the biggest thing that you
have learned in you know, thoseyears, like the best lessons best takeaways?
Well, that's a difficult one.It feels like an interviewed question.
I don't know, I don't know. I always loved, I always love
to hear from people. You know, oh I did that. You know,

(42:58):
that was a huge mistake. Butnow it is an important lesson,
you know, my biggest takeaway andthen you know, it changed the way
I do things somehow, I thinkthe biggest takeaway, I would say,
so, I'm very glad that Ihad this experience at Last minute dot Com
because here I learned how to bea manager. I learn how to be

(43:19):
an executive. I learn how todeal with the different stakeholders within the companies
and so on. The first yearat Last minute dot Com, I was
very rough. I was very veryrough. I mean, I did receive
a lot of let's say, somesome complaints internally as well, Hey this
guy is too rough. This guy'sto direct. He's like, he doesn't
care about the rules. He justwants to get stuff done and goes forward
and so on. Now, andI think over the years, maybe it's

(43:42):
the age. Maybe I became wiser, and so on, I became less
and so on. What I've learnedis that like managing people, it's not
about telling them exactly what to do, is making them understand that the idea
is theirs. And I said thatin the beginning of the of the of

(44:04):
this podcast is that I shouldn't tellyou he fel that that is the way
go there and do this. Ineed to like talk to you in a
soft manner and so on and makeyou believe that the best thing for you
is to go there and do thosethings. So it's like managing without touching.
It's like you're managing by just explainingthings and so on, but without
really like doing that. And thatis one of the biggest lessons that I

(44:29):
had. I learned, I wouldsay in a corporation because in the beginning,
I will literally say, Hey,if you're not able to do that,
I will do it yourself, andI will show you that I can
do it and that you're not capable. So it was always like it's some
sort of like a challenge that Iwas given to my people in an unfortunate
way, and I recognized that thatwasn't the best way of managing people.
Yes, it definitely got to gotto the results because I knew that if

(44:50):
I did that, I would getthe results and so on. But many
times, what I've learned is thatit's better to take a step back teach
to people properly without being so pressuringand so on, because at the end
of the day, what you getand what I was very proud of from
my experience Last dot Com is thatI'm very proud that there are a few
tens of people, I would saywithin that company now that are very strong

(45:14):
managers, that are very strong peoplethat I would definitely again in the future
work with them because I know thatthey can get their stuff done, and
they can get their results driven andso on. So learning how to manage
people is something that I've learned alot, and I'm very appreciative of the
experience that I did with last dotCom, and I feel sorry for the
people that how to help me getthere. I would you say that these

(45:38):
particular scale could be useful also insmaller companies like startups or scale ups.
I think yes, I mean forsure, scale ups for sure. And
consider when you're in a scale up, many times the founders would hire you
know, I think many start foundersthey have difficulty hiring corporate people, of

(46:00):
course, because they're you know,it was quite nice. I have to
say. You know, being anexecutive, you have a lot of benefits.
You know, you have a lotof people working for you, you
have to do slides, you havea team working on the slides for you,
and so, no, you don'thave to do things yourself directly.
But the start of founders they arethere are start of founders. I mean
they're used to doing everything by themselves. If there was something, you know,
they had to prepare documentation, theywould do themselves. If they want

(46:21):
to open a JR or ticket,they would do themselves, and so on.
So I would say it's something thatyou need to learn eventually if you
want to start scaling up for real. I've seen that happening, like that
kind of mistake with my experience myselfin my own company. I've seen that
happening definitely at some companies like Sittingmy Prince Somato, where maybe the founders

(46:44):
were too much into the details ofthe things and they couldn't scale up easily.
I've seen I still see some ofmy friends that are entrepreneurs, that
are CEO of their companies and soon, that have still difficulty letting go
in really like telling people exactly whatto do and than giving the freedom hates.
Okay if they make mistakes, butyou need to invest in them.

(47:05):
This way, they can really allowyou to multiply yourself rather than you being
always by yourself trying to tell peopleexactly what to do. So being a
manager and learning how to manage people, I think it's very important. We
usually, you know, at theend of these UM podcasts, we always
talk a little about books and tools. So let's start with books. Do

(47:30):
you have any books that you wouldlike to suggest to my audience, Something
that you are reading right now,something that I don't know was a great
book in the past, something thatyou loved. So I would definitely say
for the industry, for the peoplethat are working in the in this industry,
the books that are always recommend toeveryone, to all my people and

(47:51):
so on, is always inspired andempowered by Kaigan. I forget his name,
but it's a Kaigan and I wouldsay he's probably the best product manager
out there. And the product,the kind of book that he wrote is
is very good. And I believethat growth marketing people growth people or product
people, at the end of theday, product people should be also marketers.

(48:15):
And I'm finding product marketing altogether becausegrowth marketing is like a mix more
on the product side than the marketingside, and it's like through product that
you find the exploit to market andthe product marketing altogether. Now it's a
great Those two books are really greatbecause it really teaches people to have like
an overall view of the company.What he does is that he's trying to

(48:36):
teach people product people to become CEOsof the company. But I think for
even for a marketer reading that bookand understanding how product people or technologies people
reason, because let's always remember,marketing is not just about going on Facebook
ads or Google AdWords and so on, and you know, running campaigns and
so on. You need to dealwith you need to learn how to work

(48:57):
with the product people and technology peopleand understanding how they work. I think
it's extremely important because I've definitely seenthe issue like it's a kind of book
that I would I always told mybusiness people and my marketing people as well
to learn how to actually read becauseyou need to understand how to deal with
the stakeholders and the product and technologypeople typically are the most important stakeholders within
a company because they're the only onesthat make things happen. I mean,

(49:22):
you can talk as much as youwant, you can create as many slights
as you want, but if thetechnology teams and the product team don't want
to do what you were asking themto do, you will never get to
the point. The other books thatI'm reading are more like my passions and
so on that I am reading recently. I typically like nonfiction books, and
I was reading, for example,the book of the King of Capital.

(49:44):
It's about this PE fund black Rockis the founder of black Rock and you
know, quite a big, bigfunded out there. Another one that was
very nice was this book about anotherPEE related I think it's called The Barbarians
at the Gate. I forgot theauthor, but it's like a nonfiction so

(50:07):
for whoever that wants to learn howbig companies, like huge companies like billions
of dollars of the size of companiesget acquired by these funds and how they
how the executives fight among themselves,and all the politics that goes through within
the boardrooms and so on. Ithink it's a fascinating read or will understand
what's going on on the on thec suite and at the board level and

(50:27):
so on when these games are happening. Yeah, I guess you find all
the links in the description below.Um, and what about tools? Do
you have any tool that you reallylove that you I don't know, use
on a daily basis that you thinkare kind of you know, important and
you want to share with audience.So personally I use notion to you know,

(50:50):
to keep track of the notes andthings. But corporate wise, like
company wise, I think the besttool that provided the most benefit in general
for me in terms of collaboration andso on, is slack. Slack was
not something that last Man dot Comwas using. It was actually adopted in
twenty twenty one. Just so youunderstand that, you know, I was

(51:14):
using with my teams, like justmy internal team, but then somehow we
managed to you know, expand itacross the whole organization. But for me,
it's Slack. The reason why Ifind that important is because the democratus
is the access to the information.Because one of the things that I always
noticed within the big corporations that people, especially managers junior ones, they tend

(51:34):
to hold information and they tend tonot share that information because information is powered
so many people, they don't wantto share the information and they have with
their teams and they keep them onthe dark. But I think that is
completely wrong because we have all theCPU power right every brain is the CPU
power, right, I'm like,okay, let's make sure that we use
as much CPU power as possible.Let's feed the information to our people and

(51:55):
they will be the ones coming upwith the solutions. Would I use my
own small CPU that I have herewhen there are you know, thousands of
CPU power out there that is probablyeven much better than mine. So that's
why I always think that using aSLACK is very important. But of course
you need to train people on howto use it. Many people find the

(52:15):
distracting. That was you know,the major complaints that I had, But
I still think, you know,it brings more benefits than than you know,
non benefits there. The other thingwas that I was quite addicted to
the slack. I was a bitcrazy. Maybe I was replying to every
single slack on the public channel Iten. I tended to comment on every
single point. You know, becausemy work schedule was from nine to six,

(52:38):
I was almost like working in ain a call center, especially during
COVID time. It's because I wasn'thaving a call every single like you know
slot on the calendar. And thenfrom six to eight, I would you
know, have some free time.And then when I informed the TV with
my phone, you know, replyingto every Slack message out there and so
no, so everyone would keep sayingOkay, during the day, he's quiet,

(52:59):
and then in the evening is likebombarding everyone with his comments and all
the stuff. Of course, manypeople, some people would say and agreeably,
they didn't like that so much becausethey felt like, Okay, in
the public channel, there is Cookand he's like looking after my work and
my things and so on. MaybeI was overstepping and stuff, But still
I still think that it provides alot of benefit to the company and especially

(53:22):
to people. It makes you showthat there is no like you know,
ladd their system where Cook needs tobe an executive and you're down here so
Cook cannot talk to you or whatever. I think it's much better that you
try to flat an organization as muchas possible. Yeah, yeah, look
before saying bye. Where they canfollow you? Do you have a website,

(53:45):
Twitter, LinkedIn, any link youwant to share with us? So
I was very active on social media, but then I stopped completely because maybe
I'm getting old. I don't know, like maybe it's that and so on.
So you can follow me on LinkedIn, but I hardly post anything but
yeah, so you can email me, definitely, you can message me there

(54:05):
and more than happy to have youchat perfect. Thank you so much for
your time. What's great? Hey, thank you, what's great being here.
Thanks for listening to this episode ofthe podcast. I hope you enjoyed
it and you'll learn something new.Make sure to subscribe to us on YouTube
and Spotify to stay updated on newepisodes. With your support, I can

(54:25):
continue to bring great content and greatguests to this podcast. So he the
subscribe button now and I'll see youin the next episode.