Casey has refused to specialize in any one aspect of marketing, and this had led to a breadth of growth knowledge that he is now using to grow Pinterest.

TOPIC CASEY WINTERS COVERS

→ He is the growth marketing manager at Pinterest

→ Before that, he was the first marketer at GrubHub

→ He helped GrubHub grow from 3 cities to 500 cities

→ The experience was surreal

→ GrubHub is a marketplace that shows diners every restaurant that will deliver to their location

→ The founder of GrubHub initially thought it would only work in 6-7 cities

→ The growth was driven by the new cities growing faster than earlier cities

→ GrubHub grew from 40,000 to 3 million users

→ The growth happened unexpectedly and was driven by a lot of grunt work

→ And a whole lot more

LINKS & RESOURCES

→ His LinkedIn Profile

→ Casey’s Personal Website

WATCH THE INTERVIEW

READ THE TRANSCRIPTION

Bronson: Welcome to another episode of Growth Hacker TV. I’m Bronson Taylor and today I have Casey Winters with us. Casey, thanks for coming on the program.

Casey: Thanks for having me.

Bronson: Yeah, absolutely. Now, Casey, you are currently the growth marketing manager at Pinterest. And before that, you were the first marketer at GrubHub and you actually had a really cool story on GrubHub. So I want to start there and then we’ll kind of move into the to the Pinterest stuff and we’ll do this chronologically. So I’m good.

Casey: Sounds good to me.

Bronson: All right. So GrubHub, you helped them grow from three cities to 500 cities. What was that expansion experience like? I mean, most people don’t get to go through something quite that cool.

Casey: Yeah, it was kind of surreal. So for those who don’t know, GrubHub is a marketplace that shows diners every restaurant that will deliver to their location. And you can order food online from the app or from the website. So when I joined is talking to one of the co-founders and he said something like This probably only works in six cities or so. And then we just kept launching more and more and all the new cities were growing faster than the earlier cities. And we’re just kind of like we don’t really know where this thing stops. It was a lot of grunt work, but it never felt chaotic because we kind of just knew how to do it after a while. So we didn’t really think about it until you like, look back and you’re like, wow, 3 to 500. Like 40000 to 3 million users. Yes. It’s not something you like, go in and think you’re going to be able to do it, but it just kind of happened.

Bronson: Yeah. What were the assumptions that the founder made that made him think it was only going to work in six or seven cities? Or was there some limiting belief he had there or something?

Casey: Yeah, well, we just didn’t know how popular delivery was outside of a few major cities. So we knew it was popular in Chicago where we were. We knew it was popular in New York. We didn’t know really if people were doing it outside of the couple big tent cities. And I think what we saw after a while is that as long as we made it easier and made people realize, hey, there, there are these restaurants I can order from that the demand was always there. It just wasn’t, you know, easily aggregated. So people knew.

Bronson: Yeah, it’s interesting to hear because usually I think we overestimate how big ideas can be and then they’re much smaller in reality. And this is a case where it was much bigger in reality than, you know, you initially thought it was a good problem. Now, you actually managed a team to kind of make that growth happen. You didn’t do it all by yourself, right, in terms of marketing?

Casey: Yes, I had a team of 3 to 5, depending on the time period and what we were doing.

Bronson: Gotcha. And so talk to me a little bit about how you structure that team or what tasks they had like. Because I think it’s so valuable to learn marketing, but it’s also really valuable to learn how to lead a marketing team. So one of the things you kind of learned there.

Casey: Yeah. So the advice I got to give people when they’re trying to build a growth team or build kind of a startup marketing team, is that you want to come in and test a bunch of different growth opportunities yourself so you can really learn what the big opportunities are going to be, what can scale further if it had someone spending 100% of their time on it. So that’s basically what I spent my first year doing. Like did a lot of work on lock, work on email, did a lot of work on various other acquisition strategies. It was clear that like CRM and email, we’re going to be like the big acquisition and retention drivers, and that if we had someone focused on them 100% of the time, that they would be able to scale a lot further would be a lot more cost effective. So then I just went out to the market and found the best people to do that and brought them on the team. And the the other thing I would think about when you’re when you’re growing a team is it’s really easy to say, like, oh, I don’t have time to do this and let me bring something someone on. But if that thing’s only going to be important for a month, then you got to find out what else can that person do. So it’s you really want to validate what is the long term need? Can that really be a role? And then how do I make sure that that’s one role instead of five? So we spend a lot of time doing was figuring out how to automate repeatable processes and figure out like how to scale things with a lean team. Because at least early on, we didn’t have a lot of money to be building like a, you know, a gigantic marketing team. So, so generally I would say, you know, try to put out little tasks, try to see what could scale with, you know, amplifying a team and then go find subject matter experts in terms of managing them day to day, which you what I started with was like me directing a lot of here’s where we need to go the next month, the next few months, and then trying to train the people on the higher level strategy of startup growth so that over time those people are managing the execution and the strategy. And I think that’s the only way that you can continue to scale because you’re not going to be two, three years down the road. The expert on email and CRM and SEO and mobile at the same company. It’s just too much to keep in your head.

Bronson: Yeah. So on day one, it was almost like you were the architect that had the strategy and you were just finding these people that were really good at the specific things that you knew would work. So when you hired early on, you didn’t hire great marketers. You hired great people for search engine marketing. You hire great people for email marketing, but then as you kind of evolved and things went further, you started to let them do more strategy and expected them to do more strategy. So they became kind of higher level startup growth people, right?

Casey: Yeah, exactly.

Bronson: Yeah. No, I love that. That’s awesome advice. And I love the idea of you testing the water and then hiring for that specific channel because I can imagine, you know, marketing is so broad now that if you just hired a good marketer, they might be useless at the one thing you actually needed for the next year.

Casey: Exactly. And if you’re bringing on that marketer before you know what’s really going to be the high impact thing, you’re just probably not going to find the person that most closely aligns to your biggest growth drivers.

Bronson: Yeah, I really like that. No, the growth drivers hire for those growth drivers. Let them do strategy later, not on day one. Now, when you went into a new city, you know, going from 3 to 500, did you have to roll out an entirely new marketing plan for each city, or was it just a carbon copy of the marketing plan from other cities? How did that expansion work from a marketing point of view?

Casey: Yeah. So our goal when I started was to basically build a replicable growth engine that we could use to launch every city. And eventually we were able to do that. You would have like some minor tweaks based on, you know, some specific opportunities that might be available in one city, but otherwise it was basically the same. So we’d send a couple salespeople in for a few weeks. They talk to restaurants, they come back with a few dozen restaurants that would be willing to work with us. Day one, I would go and create landing pages for all of those restaurants and all the cities zip code, neighborhood college and cuisine combinations that represented those restaurants. We would make all of those available to search engines, and then we would bid on paid search for those where we had enough of a density that we could get a good CPA. So for something like San Francisco, Thai, if we had, let’s say, six restaurants, we knew our conversion rate would be good enough to be able to get a good, cost effective CPCs. So we turned that on. So that was a basically the process. And then once we had all that ready to go, we would go to press and we would say, Hey, we’re launching in your city. We’d love to get $10 off to your readers. And to use that, here’s a promo. You are all they can go to you. So that promo URL would work for like 30 days and then we would just redirect it back to the SEO page, which would give us the authority to rank really high for those keywords.

Bronson: Yeah.

Casey: And basically the process we used every time that.

Bronson: Was enough to kind of get the whole thing going. So you only start out with 12, 20 restaurants, whatever, but then you would grow to much more because of the initial PR and all that stuff.

Casey: Yeah. And we would continue to have sales people try to grow that market. But as long as we were able to get, you know, somewhere in like 30 to 50 to start, we had enough where we could continue to grow the diner side, which would attract more restaurants.

Bronson: Yeah. No, that’s awesome. So you mentioned, you know, kind of big things for you guys were search engine marketing, which you already mentioned a little bit of how you use that and then also email marketing. So the search engine marketing, you know, you’re driving on to these landing pages. You know, at first, was there any kind of ongoing CRM that you were doing beyond just driving on to these landing pages?

Casey: Yeah. Basically it was getting as refined as possible as we could with the local targeting and the cuisine targeting. So we would constantly be growing from like the center of a city outward, and then we would, which means we’d have to constantly add new neighborhoods, news coverage, that sort of stuff. So basically we were always targeting people that were typing stuff like, you know, neighborhood plus delivery, neighborhood plus Mexican or whatever. And you just continue to expand that base of keywords out as you add it in the restaurants at the top that covered, you know, those keywords.

Bronson: That’s an interesting strategy because I think about like it’s one thing if you’re typing in delivery, obviously, you know that they’re a possible customer, but neighborhood plus Mexican or neighborhood plus, you know, Thai, it doesn’t necessarily say, I want delivery. But you guys found that you could still go one of those niches and get them thinking about it and become a customer.

Casey: Yeah, exactly.

Bronson: Yeah. No, that’s cool. It broadens the amount of keywords you can play with if you start thinking about your business in different ways and thinking that I can educate them and maybe they’ll like this, even though it’s not what they’re looking for. I think sometimes we think about them like it’s another Google search that they were looking forward or they weren’t, but you were actually converting them through the search?

Casey: Yeah. I mean, no one was looking for online ordering back in 2008, right? True. But if people are searching for food delivery, we felt comfortable that we could have our message behind this is a better way to order food and get that conversion. And after you do that for a while, you can also expand outward even further up that to odd all restaurant keywords. You know, our cuisine type keywords are generally a better strategy for on the side than the side because the conversion lead time can be a little bit longer. Yeah, it’s certainly a great way to expand your keyword base.

Bronson: Yeah. Now talk about email marketing. You know, you said that was kind of the other big component that you knew you wanted to hire for. What did you guys do in terms of email to get on a list on day one and you’re just hitting almost something every week because as simple as that. Or was it more complicated?

Casey: Yeah. So when I started email, I thought was going to be, you know, a big retention driver for GrubHub. But I didn’t really do a good job of convincing the founders of it. So I just started sending manual emails and the lists were basically cut by city. So I would find like five restaurants that covered five different areas in the city and then like blast it to the entire city and built that up to like thousands of orders a month. And at that point is able to convince the business that, hey, there’s something here. This me sending blast one off manually doesn’t scale know as we continue to grow the number of cities we’re in. So we invested in kind of an automated and personalized system. So what we do is once a week we’ll find we have like a certain number of templates, right? New restaurants that deliver to you highest rated and most popular, that sort of stuff. And we would send one of those templates completely personalized for your last search delivery address to you. And that’s been very effective at just making people aware of the restaurant options they have and then bringing them back to order.

Bronson: Yeah. And that was that a tool that you guys built yourself for is that, you know, Marketo or HubSpot or something else?

Casey: We used ExactTarget. Okay. So the recommendation algorithm we built ourselves and then we would upload that data into ExactTarget and add a lot of complicated logic. Looking at like the previous templates you had seen to determine which one you should get this week to prevent email fatigue.

Bronson: All right. Let me ask you this. Does the complicated logic pay off? Because I’m always tempted to think like, am I going to get just such a marginal increase that’s worth all this time of building this engine? Or is it really worth it in the end to make it that logic, that specific to the user always are all the experience.

Casey: Yeah. So I can tell you overall from moving to like the manual process to ExactTarget, we’re able to triple the percentage of orders that came from email. Well, it’s hard to parse out how much of that was personalization versus how much of that was the logic side. I think it was a combination of the both, but we didn’t do an exact experience to parse out which one. I would say generally it’s worth it email. You know, there’s certainly a lot of upfront time, but it’s one of those things where you once you set up that process, those jobs can just run automatically in the future. And if you get it right, the dividends are there thing you always worry about with email as if you’re sending the same content all the time, that people just get fatigued and then they stop opening stuff. So we really thought it was important to vary up the content a lot with.

Bronson: Those different.

Casey: Needs. Yeah, pretty long. Subscribe rates with that.

Bronson: Yeah, that was awesome. Now it GrubHub. You also did a little bit of mergers and acquisitions. You actually acquired a company. So talk to me about that a little bit. Who’d you acquire and was that super difficult integrating all that together or how to go?

Casey: Yeah. So we acquired a company called Campus Food, which had a similar product, GrubHub. It was only available in college towns. So my task there was to figure out how to you maintain all the search engine rankings they had because they’re ranking very well for like, you know, University of Wisconsin food delivery, stuff like that. And also to figure out how to transition their entire. Higher user base to a new website before the school year ended. So we did a lot of research to understand who those customers were. Who are the valuable ones? Who were the not so valuable ones? And we we built a system where he tried to go to campus. Could we redirect you to GrubHub? But we have kind of this overlay that explained, Hey, what happens? Here’s how to migrate your account. And in the case of if you’re a really good user, get some free food out of it. We wanted to make sure that we migrated all the people that were really ordering a lot of food. So we were generous with how much money we gave them to switch over. But if you were someone that had only really ordered once, then we weren’t going to give you anything. We just told you to migrate your account and that was a really effective strategy for us. We were able to really grow our base of cities that we covered and maintain most of that user base and transition a lot of them to GrubHub when they graduated because the college campus food had is that they had you for four years and then you went off to the big city and there’s really no way for them to continue to have you as a customer.

Bronson: Yeah. Let me ask you this. You know, I don’t know how much you bought them for. I don’t need to know. But you bought them. You know, as you look at it, if you had taken that same amount of money that you bought them for and you invested in paid, you know, you know, you know, PPC, something like that. Was buying them a much better ROI overall or was it kind of a break even? You could have grown either way in the room about the same what those metrics look like there?

Casey: Yeah, I would say making the decision to acquire them is much more effective. The problem you have with the marketplace is that there are limitations on how fast you can grow because you need to build up both sides of the business, right? So when you’re starting a market from scratch, it could take it could have taken ten years to catch up to where campus food wise in a lot of these college campuses. But we were able to kind of immediately have all those people transition and start using and start using GrubHub. So there’s there’s a temptation to say, like, oh, let’s just double the amount we’re spending on PPC. And we certainly tried that experiment before, but we found that we would hit like an efficient frontier where we could spend more, but we basically get the same amount of new customers from it and then just end up paying more for each customer from a CPA perspective. So we certainly tried going bigger in marketing and found that, you know, as a marketplace, it’s just not really effective. You find out where your limits are and where you can still get effective CPAs, and then you need to kind of look for a new channel to augment. And M&A turned out to be a good one there.

Bronson: Yeah, no, it makes sense. I’m always interested in companies that do M&A, especially when they’re smaller companies like GrubHub and that they’re still out buying companies and making it work. I think it’s just a growth channel. We don’t think about as much as other channels. So it’s interesting to just kind of entertain the idea for the people watching this. Now, looking back at their time at GrubHub, what do you feel like was your best decision as the head of marketing there? In which decision is probably the worst decision, if there is one.

Casey: Yeah. So I made a lot of mistakes.

Bronson: We all do.

Casey: Yeah. I’d say the best decision I made was to just adopt a consistent framework for what success and failure was from a growth perspective. We decided really early on that we wanted to make our money back off of every new user within six months, and we evaluated every new marketing initiative we did on that goal post. So it didn’t matter how cool something was or how much awareness we received. If it wasn’t generating a CPA that made us money in six months, we stopped it. And I think as you’re a lean startup, that’s a really good you had kind of adopt a rigorous framework like that because otherwise in marketing, you can spend a ton of money on on campaigns that don’t really help you and convince yourself it’s worth it based on some sort of, you know, vague understanding of awareness or whatnot. But we said going either brings in the users right then or it doesn’t and we’re moving on.

Bronson: Yeah, well, I think it’s it’s kind of the direct marketing mindset being brought to maybe a more traditional marketing role of it has to give me a positive or lie in some realistic time frame because we’re not doing this for awareness, you know, and that’s what modern marketing is becoming. It’s leaving awareness and going toward something much better. I think in a lot of ways, not that we need to be direct marketers totally. Brand matters, awareness matters, but we need to have just some hard numbers in of the day.

Casey: Yeah, I mean, brand. Brand was a fantastic investment for us. We thought we grew a lot via word of mouth, but we tried to dig in to word of mouth. We found that people were really embarrassed to talk about using GrubHub. Really. They didn’t want to talk about how they stayed in on Friday night and ordered pizza. You know, they wanted their friends to think that they were off, you know, at some cool new bar or restaurant. So we invested in kind of a really quirky brand where if you didn’t want to talk about this use case, you could at least talk about some quirky ad we did or some ridiculous tweet we made or the liner notes of our latest app update that were, you know, reference something weird from the eighties. So we thought that brand was extremely important, but we didn’t say, hey, because this is brand focused, we’re not going to measure it on. Efficiency and cost per acquisition, that outlook.

Bronson: So that’s kind of best decision. You had a framework. What do you feel like is maybe the one of the worst decisions you made there as a marketer?

Casey: Yeah, I think sometimes trying to move fast. I made some mistakes so early. It doesn’t necessarily represents, you know, the long term data. So a couple of examples is like we tried acquisition via coupon sites like Groupon, RetailMeNot, and the early data always looks great. Like your Groupon customers, they come in, they purchase immediately, they can purchase again at full price. And you’re like, This is great. But then when you measure it over the long term, you see all these people who wait until the expiration date of the coupon order and like those people never came back. So in aggregate, it wasn’t an effective acquisition channel. Similar with RetailMeNot, like if you try spending some money there and you’re like, Oh, it’s cost effective, these people are coming back and they’re ordering again. And then you’re like, Wait a minute. My total number of users didn’t really go up and you just realized that they’re stealing share from direct because it’s people that like gets it to the confirmation page. See, you have a coupon code field and then Google.

Bronson: Really not.

Casey: And angry totally not gets the credit. Yeah. So what I always tried to do after making those mistakes was measure things on like a one month, three months, six month scale to really make sure that everything mapped to our goals. And if there was a reason that I thought things didn’t really make sense or things were too good to be true. Really doing a deep dove to understand the psychology there, what’s going on. But the couple of times I didn’t do that, I felt like we wasted some money on some ineffective stuff.

Bronson: Yeah. No. Thanks for being so open about that. That’s awesome to learn from. So let’s talk about Pinterest a little bit. How long have you been at Pinterest now as the growth marketing manager there?

Casey: Yeah, I started in December, so it’s been about ten months.

Bronson: All right, cool. So you had a little bit of time there already. So what does a growth marketing manager do? What is your day to day actually look like?

Casey: I’m not even sure if that’s my official title anymore. I don’t know. It’s kind of a blur.

Bronson: Well, what do you do? No matter what we call you?

Casey: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a highly variable. So you can think of me as functioning as, like, a product manager for retention SEO and landing page optimization. So generally, I’m working with engineers and designers on implementing new ideas, measuring impacts, stuff like that. So I’ll either be writing strategies out, planning the next few weeks of development, spending a lot of time in Excel or writing SQL queries to like understand how in experiments performing or how users are doing a certain thing, that sort of stuff.

Bronson: So it kind of sounds like it’s similar to especially what you did earlier at GrubHub, where you’re kind of the guy with a strategy. You see the overall play from SEO to landing page to conversion and retention, but you’re not designing it and you’re not building the landing page in code and you know, you’re not doing all the things manually yourself, but you’re overseeing the strategy and making sure all the pieces come together.

Casey: Yeah, exactly.

Bronson: Yeah. No, I think it’s awesome. It’s cool to think about that because some companies, they need people like you. And I just don’t know it yet, you know, because right now it’s somebody just doing it all when really they have a strategic mind. And if you gave them people to do some of these other roles, they might go to accelerate growth a little bit.

Casey: Yeah, I mean, I think of it as like a lot of growth companies. They’re just, you know, blindly doing a bunch of experiments. And to me, it’s like being in a dark room trying to search for the door. And if you can add in like an understanding of the strategy and understanding of the user, it would be like turning a light on so you know immediately where to go. And so that’s what I try to do. There’s still a lot of, you know, manual work that goes into making Pinterest grow, but I’m trying to make sure we align it to like a broader strategy and that we really are learning things every time instead of just kind of blindly running experiments.

Bronson: Yeah. Now, some of the areas you mentioned under the LinkedIn profile that you kind of focus on and you just mentioned SEO email and mobile. So just walk me through a little bit what you’re doing in those areas at Pinterest, because it’s always fun to kind of, you know, peer behind the curtain and see what a company that we all respect is actually doing on the same kind of tactics that we’re trying to execute on. So like SEO, for instance, what is Pinterest doing there to really move the needle?

Casey: Yeah, so SEO is an extremely important acquisition channel for us. Pinterest has loads of content, you know, over 30 billion events. So our task is to help Google understand what all this content is about since it’s highly visual. So we’re constantly thinking about, you know, what are ways that we can add text on the page that will help Google understand like, Oh, this board is about X. So when people are searching for that on Google, we should show up. The other thing that we spend a lot of time working on is helping Google find the right content amidst the sea of pins. Google’s not going to crawl all 30 billion pins, right? It just doesn’t have that that amount of time to allocate. So we got to spend time figuring out where to link to what to show in our site maps so that Google sees the things that are actually helpful for them and doesn’t see, you know, all the duplicates or all of the things that just aren’t really relevant for what anyone’s searching for. And that might sound kind of boring, but it’s extremely successful work. If you hit on the right things and we’ve been able to grow a lot of that recently.

Bronson: Yeah. So it’s really kind of this complicated dance you have to do with Google to make sure the SEO works for you guys.

Casey: Yeah, I’d say the biggest difference between like the SEO we do here at Pinterest and at a lot of typical companies is it’s not keyword focused, right? It’s not like, oh, we’re trying to work for trying to rank for a visual discovery tool or something like that. It’s, you know, we already have all this content. There are hundreds of millions of keywords we can rank for. Based on that, we’re not picking and choosing among those what we want to rank for. We’re just trying to apply strategies across all of that content so Google can figure out what it’s all about.

Bronson: Yeah, it’s definitely this big macro kind of SEO strategy. What about email? What are you guys doing with email there?

Casey: Yeah, so email is pretty central to the product is it’s our engagement loop, right? So someone rethink your content, you see that you come back to Pinterest, you post more content, it gets more events, things like that. We actually spend most of our time on now is email is kind of a a dual headed strategy where we’re recommending personalized content based on your previous ends and boards and curating content on specific topics that we think are relevant for your interest. So if you’ve been planning about food in food and drink related things, we’ll send you topics. I think the last week it was about mustard. You know, historically we’ve done like, you know, bacon and eggs and all sorts of different topics. So we kind of have this balance of curated manual stuff and automated personalized content that just gets sent out automatically.

Bronson: Yeah, again, it kind of goes back to what you’re doing at GrubHub. You were sending out these emails on scale that were personalized and curated for that city. It seems like the same kind of thinking is being applied with emails there at Pinterest, which is cool. Yeah. What about what about mobile? What are you guys doing there from your point of view?

Casey: Yeah. So we don’t spend any mobile money on mobile advertising or anything, but most of our usage today is on mobile devices. So we really invest in making the product work mobile first. And what that means from a growth perspective is, yeah, you have to invest in deep links in the app and make sure all those work really smoothly. You need to have a very robust push notification strategy. Our App Store listings need to be fully optimized, so we spend a lot of time, you know, making sure all of that stuff is perfect and we treat push notifications very similar to how we treat the email channel where it’s a main retention driver. So we’re constantly testing strategies there.

Bronson: Yeah. Now when you kind of compare the to the stuff you were doing at GrubHub and the stuff you’re now doing on Pinterest, is it same strategies, same ideas, just a different company? And really it applies to both? Or is it just a different animal being at Pinterest and doing these things? Did you have to relearn all the stuff you knew when you came to Pinterest ten months ago, or how do you compare them?

Casey: Yeah, so I’d say it’s kind of in between the two that you described. So there is definitely a bigger learning curve than I expected. The scale of Pinterest is is so different and the tools in your toolbox are different too. So, you know, paid marketing, which I spent a lot of time doing at GrubHub, is not really an applicable strategy for Pinterest because we’re still figuring out our revenue model and all those things. There’s just no way to know, you know, what a six month value of a user is to be able to understand what your CPA should be. So a lot of my GrubHub experience just kind of goes away right there. And on the scale side, some things that work when you’re sending 90 million emails a year don’t work when you’re sending over 90 million a day. So those are the things where I had to kind of like learn what’s appropriate. And the other thing that was different is that at GrubHub, it was really easy to tell what success looked like, right? People either ordered or they didn’t. And at Pinterest, there’s so many things you can do. And, you know, none of them tied directly to financial rewards for the company at this point. So it can be a little bit harder to tell, you know, what’s optimized for clearly you want to drive signups and clearly you want people to come back. But beyond that, do you want them to do repenting? Do you want them to create boards? You want them to follow people, all of those. It’s kind of left up to interpretation. But the core organic strategies, like you mentioned, that are used across like SEO, email conversion optimization, you know, a lot of that stuff still works extremely well here and that’s where I’ve been able to provide a lot of the game since I’ve started.

Bronson: Yeah. Okay. So this is an awesome interview. I just have two final questions for you. One, I thought it would be kind of fun to ask after the interview. What are you working on today?

Casey: Yeah, so I’ll be working on finalizing our Q4 retention roadmap. Just figuring out, you know, the strategies and the projects we want to do to increase retention. I’ll be working with a designer and a copywriter on a new welcome email series that we’re about to roll out, and I’ll be writing some title tags and matter descriptions for some new mobile focused SEO pages. And I’d say that’s that’s probably a typical day.

Bronson: That’s awesome. And then. The last question to assist all the guests is what’s the best advice you have for any startup that’s trying to grow?

Casey: Yeah. So, you know, a lot of startups asking you this question and they’re always asking me about little hacks they can do to grow. And I think what you’re looking for a startup, you’re not looking for a little hack that provides a one time bomb. You’re looking to build sustainable growth. Right? And you do that by building systems and investing in them over the long term. Sure. You want to get a short term return on that. You don’t want to go out of business while you’re trying to build, you know, kind of a long term growth engine. But you want to build something that’s basically a gift that keeps on giving. And so my advice typically is to try to build long term growth systems or growth engines, not try to look for a hack that’s going to work for three months. And then you’re going to need to find something else because then your growth is going to be very bumpy and that’s not what you want because you’ll end up not getting to where you’re trying to go.

Bronson: Yeah, well, that is a perfect advice to end on. So, Casey, thank you again for coming on Growth Hacker TV.

Casey: Yeah, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.