Justin literally wrote the book on traction, and he gives us awesome growth insights, including why the intersection of SQL and marketing matters.

TOPIC JUSTIN MARES COVERS

→ He wrote the “Traction” book, a startup guide for getting customers

→ He is also the former director of revenue at Air Brake

→ Teaches a class called “School for Marketers and Growth Hackers”

→ The book will be out on August 1st on Amazon in hard copy, audio book and e-book

→ The Traction book is a startup guide for getting customers

→ The book was written because the authors saw that most startups were failing to get traction, not because they couldn’t build a product

→ The book will be available on August 1st in various formats such as hard copy, audio book, and e-book

→ The book covers how successful startups have approached traction and how they think about getting traction in the first couple of chapters

→ The book is for entrepreneurs, startup people, and marketers who are serious about starting a company or running marketing for a startup

→ And a whole lot more

LINKS & RESOURCES

→ Traction book

→ Justin’s LinkedIn Profile

WATCH THE INTERVIEW

READ THE TRANSCRIPTION

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

Justin: Thanks for having me, Russell.

Bronson: Yeah, I think you wrote the perfect book for someone to come on this show. You’re actually the coauthor of the traction book. And if that’s not relevant, I don’t know what’s relevant for this show. So you wrote the Traction book, which is a startup guide for getting customers. You’re also the former director of revenue at Air Brake. Another topic that’s going to be super valuable for this audience. And you teach a class called School for Marketers and Growth Hackers. So you are the quintessential growth hacker TV guys. So welcome.

Justin: Yeah. Thanks for having me on. I’m excited to be here.

Bronson: Yeah, this should be a fun conversation. So let’s jump right in. Let’s talk about the traction book. So you wrote the book and it’s actually called Traction. They can find it traction books. Is that.

Justin: Right? Yeah. So it’ll be out on August 1st. And so, you know, it’ll be on traction. But Amazon, you know, we have a hard copy, audio book, e-book, all of that stuff is coming out. So it’ll be good.

Bronson: So let’s dove into some of the content of it. But first, how’d the book come about? What compelled you to coauthor this book?

Justin: Yeah. So my coauthor, Gabriel Weinberg, we basically saw all this thing in startups where most startups are not failing anymore to build a product, but are actually failing because they can’t get traction. And so this whole thing about like the series on ship and start ups, like the failure rate of startups being too high, you very rarely see a startup that’s like, yep, we failed because we didn’t build the product. It’s always like we couldn’t get enough customers. We can scale to where we needed to be to raise our next round of funding to be profitable, to do whatever. And so whereas I think the Lean Startup came out, came from kind of a viewpoint of like companies are failing because they can’t build a product or they’re not building the right ones. I think the lean methodologies are pretty ingrained in the startup culture now and most people are failing due to marketing and traction related reasons.

Bronson: You know.

Justin: It’s.

Bronson: Really similar to why we started growth out of TV. We looked and were like, Look, anybody can build a product now. There’s a new hurdle. And it’s just kind of an interesting idea is do you have any idea what the next hurdle is or is growth the final frontier?

Justin: So honestly, I think it’s going to be design driven marketing. So I think like you see things like I think that growth hacks that are working well and marketing that’s working well is increasingly blurring the line between a well-designed feature and marketing. So I think you see things like hub spots greater, like they’re marketing greater that is responsible for, I think, 50,000 leads a month or something. And that is like a design driven tool that is also like their biggest marketing channel. It’s just like a weird kind of thing, you know? Yeah. And I think the future.

Bronson: Of startups is a weird mix.

Justin: Yeah. Yeah. But then, you know, it’s like, one of the things that we explore in the book is we basically introduce like how successful startups have approached traction and how they think about getting traction in the first couple of chapters. And one of the things that we talk about there is focusing like to grow really, really rapidly. You focus on platforms and doing things that other that other people aren’t. And so I think design driven marketing is like a thing now that more people should think about. But, you know, two years from now, if the book does well, then maybe that won’t be something that works anymore, you know?

Bronson: Yeah, that’s all it is. Channels get crowded, and then you’ve got to figure out something new. So who is this book for? Is it for the entrepreneur, the startup person? Is it for the marketer? Is it for both? Is it for something else? Who should read this?

Justin: Yeah. So I hate saying this because as a marketer, like, you know, you’re like, know your audience, like, targeted audience, but like, really, it’s for all of those people. And so I think, like, if I look at the landscape of startup books, like for Steps to the Epiphany, Lean Startups, venture deals like I think Traction Books should be one of the four or five books that you read if you are serious about starting a company. And on the flip side, if you’re running marketing for a startup or the founding a startup like I think this is something that you should read or at the very least like read some blog posts or something will have coming out about it and like get these ideas in your head.

Bronson: Yeah. And for those that are paying attention, that’s how you position a new product when you come out with something is you list out all the great ones and then put your name right there with them. So that’s from a marketer right there. That’s how you position a book. That’s also it’s like you don’t have venture deals. You should read this one, too. That’s awesome. Now, this book was written kind of through the lens of other growth experts. You did a lot of interviews and kind of pulled together a lot of that data was the reason for writing a book like that. I like the style of I think it’s cause the reason there.

Justin: Yeah. So it’s kind of twofold. So basically what? What both Mike and I hate is reading a book that like a business book that can be like 50 pages and is kind of fluffed out like 210 pages or something. So you do the math for the bar, but you know, and so we really condense the like the crux of the book into the first five chapters, which is all strategy. Like here’s how you approach getting traction, here’s how you should think about getting traction, here’s how to be intentional about it, how to run tests, all the stuff. And then we have 19 other chapters. And in each chapter we each chapter covers one traction channel. So for example, we have a chapter on PR, chapter on sales, chapters of a chapter on debt advertising. And so we interviewed all these people because we wanted to write the definitive book on marketing traction growth. And to do that, like I wasn’t going to learn how to write a good offline ad, you know, and then try and become an expert in that field and then like position myself as an expert because otherwise it’d just be me, me regurgitating, like, blog posts that I found on the Internet. Yeah. And so we wanted to interview people that had some sex success in each channel and get the best practices and, like, find out what worked for that show.

Bronson: Yeah, that’s a great project. So as you look at the completed book now, what are your personal biggest takeaways concerning growth? Because I’m sure some of the things really hit home as you’re hearing from these experts and what they’ve done.

Justin: Yeah. So the biggest one, I think, is that people don’t take growth seriously. Like employment. Like if you were to talk to any startup founder, he would be like you’d be like, what is your product development like? What’s on your roadmap? He’s like, Oh, we’re going to release this feature and then do this, and then we’re going to like release this. And they’re like, Sweet. What’s your plan to get traction or distribution? He’s like, Oh, like we have some blog posts. You know, it’s like not even comparable in terms of how much effort and how much they’re putting into like traction versus product development. And so I think that’s just like a massive mistake that a lot of founders make. Yeah. You know, so not being intentional about it, not taking it seriously enough. And then the other big thing is that people don’t pursue traction and product development in parallel. And so, you know, the lean startup is great, but what people end up are they end up applying lean startup is like interview five customers build, build, build, build, launch back to those five customers. And like in reality you want to approach both because you want to see like, okay, can our distribution channel scale in the same way that our product is scaling? Like you want to be testing out both, both things so you don’t end up in this space that a lot of startups get to where it’s like, are products done? Engineering is like now just working on bug fixes and like some marginal feature improvements and now we have to start getting traction and they’re like six, 12, 18 months down the road, like down the road of starting the company. And yeah, and that’s a pretty common problem and it’s just terrible.

Bronson: Now those are two great kind of high level takeaways. What’s your favorite quote in the book and ask you because you’ve interviewed so many experts? I want to kind of know what’s the nugget that you just really liked?

Justin: Yeah. So one of my favorites was back to the existing platforms thing. So we interviewed Alex Patrick Renaud and he was talking about how Evernote, basically they killed themselves, like to get to be the first app in every new marketplace launch. So they were like, They’re on the Android, they’re on iOS, they’re on Google play. It’s like they were the first one on all of those. Mm hmm. And like, well, you know, they flopped. But all the others, like they got incredible growth from being first on some of these massive platforms that had Apple, Verizon, Google, marketing dollars like Drive, adoption of the platforms. And they were one of the very first now apps and tools on there. Yeah. And so that was that was pretty incredible. Like, that was an awesome interview.

Bronson: Now that’s cool. What’s the most surprising thing you learned about growth from one of these people as you kind of put together this book?

Justin: Yeah, so I think I’m always surprised, like how much thought these people put into it. So like, you know, coming from like if you were to read blog posts on marketing, you would just kind of assume that it’s something that happens. And like people write blog posts and it’s, you know, it’s like a blog post works but it doesn’t or, you know, like get traction or it doesn’t. But it’s crazy like talking to the guys at Kayak like they were very, very intentional about what features and rolled out, how they approach their marketing like the types of deals they went after. And then the other thing too, that I think is not talked about enough in startup plan is like the importance of the importance of branding and positioning. Like there were a lot of like Jimmy Wales especially he was just like fanatical about. We are not going to do any sort of marketing like this. We’re not going to hire companies or anything like this because that reflects badly on Wikipedia brand. And the brand is all we have. And I think that in the day of like, you know, follow people on Twitter and favorite their tweets, so they follow you back and like do this and nominated fashion. It’s very much, you know, it’s not like brand conscious. Like you don’t you’re not really thinking about like, what does that say about the type of company you are or you represent or.

Bronson: So I really like that one because it does seem like there’s two camps. There’s a traditional marketers that know everything about about brand and couldn’t direct marketing. Their life depended on it. And then there’s the direct marketers, the growth hackers, the startup marketers, and they’re all about, did the channel have a positive ROI? I don’t care how ugly the logo is, but really, why do you have to pick one? Why can’t you have an awesome brand like Apple and know what makes you money and double down on it? It’s not like you can do both. I mean, when I think about growth out of TV, I want a brand that also can market like a growth hacker all at the same time. And it goes back to that original thing. You said that design has a role that people don’t realize. I mean, besides Craigslist, what ugly thing has worked? You know, I mean, yeah, there’s not many like you can count them on one hand, but all the things that have work that we know about, they’re beautiful also. So I’m not saying we need to be traditional marketers, but I agree we need to drag brand into the conversation because it matters even if it’s not the main thing we need to focus on.

Justin: Yeah. And I think that even if you’re running like an incredibly data driven, analytics driven company, like you are still getting somewhere between 30 and 50% of your signups that you just like can attribute, you know, friends. Yeah, exactly. And like, that is just a fact of the industry. And I am like going to go out on a limb and say that your brand impacts like a significant chunk of that unattributed percentage. And so if you want to grow that, like I think brand is very much worth thinking about, especially in the early stages of a company.

Bronson: Yeah, I totally agree. Now, let me like. I’m sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Justin: No, I mean, I just I don’t think that you want to be in a space where you’re, like, always searching for the next growth hack to, like, try and get people into your product funnel. Like, I think at some point you want to grow tacular where like brand awareness and then let brand like. Mm. That kind of take over and create like a snowball effect. You know you.

Bronson: Mentioned earlier the word positioning and it goes back to a book by Al Ries, which was the title. The book was Positioning the Battle for Your Mind or something like that. And the thing about a brand is if you can get your brand to occupy a place in their mind that’s not currently occupied by some other brand or some other product that I mean, you literally have real estate in somebody’s head. I mean, that’s a valuable thing in the world, but that comes back to brand. And like you said, growth hacking may get your foot in the door, but the brand is what allows you to live in their mind forever. I mean, absolute. I say that again because Apple lives in my mind in a special way that other brands don’t. And if their growth had into a great. But they didn’t stay because of growth hacking necessarily.

Justin: Right. I mean, I think a great case is like look at Vine is like video or social care, like social cam video, massively growth hacked like had tens of millions of users I think like 50 million at some point. And yet like after those growth hacks stopped working, they just went back down. Whereas Vine did some of the similar stuff, but also great design, great team, very brand focused, very like concise message where it knew what the product was about and they’re still growing like incredibly. And a lot of that is just random because people want to be involved with what they’re doing, you know?

Bronson: Absolutely. So let me ask you this. In your opinion, you know, you wrote a book about advice other people are given us and we should follow some of that advice. That’s what I do on this show. On Growth after TV we talk, we’ll give people advice on what to do. But then you also hear the idea of if you’re talking about it is too late and you need to be doing stuff that’s so new on nobody’s radar. What’s the balance there? How much of it is reading books like Traction, Watching Growth Out of TV, Learning from Experts and how much is it? You need to go into a dark room, be super creative and come up with something that’s never been done? What do you think about that?

Justin: Yeah, so I think so. I have I think basically there are principles that you want to follow and that’s what we try and lay out on Traction Book is like, here’s how a high level strategically you should talk about and approach the process of getting traction. Like I think that the first five chapters of five chapters, the textbook, but for like 50 years people would be like, man, that’s like good advice, you know? And like this is how you should approach marketing that. And then maybe like the other 19 channels, specific chapters probably won’t make sense in 50 years. And so I think like you take high level strategy and you apply them to grow rapidly in new channels like. So I think it’s definitely a balance. I will say that there are also there are basics that work and I. A lot of people feel like they need to find the next cutting edge growth hack when that’s not necessarily true. Like if you’re doing a B2B start up, like there are very tried and true marketing tactics that you can optimize the heck out of. And then once you get the basics down and you need to locate your next level of growth, then by all means, like experiment with crazy stuff. That’s how it should go. Mm hmm. But I would want to nail down the basics first. Like, if you’re getting zero customers, like, why lines here with all these crazy things, just like you can do the basics, like ads, outbound email, blog posts, like all these things. Mm hmm. They work really well. You know.

Bronson: And you have to really understand and execute the fundamentals before you move on. You know, it’s like I play basketball, and it’s like, because I’m good at the fundamentals. I’m not that fancy, and yet I can win. Other people are fancy, but they don’t know the fundamentals. Yeah. And it’s like it’s not even fair when you combat against somebody that really has the fundamentals in any area because it’s almost like an unfair advantage because they have the base layer that they can build off of. And when they decide to get fancy, it’s going to matter.

Justin: Yeah, totally. I mean, I think of it like like growth is like losing weight in some ways where it’s like if you wanted to lose £100, do not tell them to, like, try the ketogenic diet and like all this crazy, like stuff and just be like, oh hell yeah. Just the basics. Like, eat cleaner, work out for, like half an hour at work and you’ll see. Okay from that. Once you have those down, we’ll talk about losing. You know, and I think that a lot of marketing is about like people talk about losing the last £20 and I just like knowing the basics.

Bronson: So I love that. That’s great. So let’s talk about air brake a little bit. You were formerly the director of revenue there. So first, what is a director of revenue? What would you actually do there?

Justin: Yeah, so that Eric was interesting. So basically we were a developer tools company. Our founder bought a bunch of small developer tools that had several thousand users on the order of thousands of dollars a month in revenue. And the challenge there, since he was buying a developer tools product from a developer from developers. The challenge there was not like, how do we build this amazing product that resonates with people? It was like, how do we make this a sustainable business? Because to give you a sense, one of the products we bought was charging $2 a month for a lot of their product.

Bronson: And so I don’t care what you’re selling in Brazil for $2 a month. You messed up.

Justin: Yeah, exactly. It’s like one support email and that customer is like unprofitable for three months, you know, just in terms of your time. So yeah. And so that’s a very different challenge than the average person who comes on in like a gross capacity is like we need to grow this in terms of users and like product and like all of a sudden we were just like, okay, we have these products, we know that they’re working, we’re getting signups, and now we need to figure out how to grow the revenue side and like build a real business behind them.

Bronson: So it’s a fun role to kind of get to play.

Justin: Yeah, it was. It was. So that’s why that’s like why I don’t think you see that title that much, but like literally everything I did was like revenue.

Bronson: It’s I want that. It sounds fun. I like to go in a place to be like, All right, I want to help you guys make money.

Justin: Yeah.

Bronson: So as the director of revenue, I’m sure there’s only a handful of levers you can really pull to kind of get revenue up. You know, we talked about the fundamentals before, the basics. You already mentioned pricing. So I’m sure that’s one of those levers. What were the main levers, pricing and what else were you kind of let’s change this because it matters for revenue. Let’s change this because it matters for revenue.

Justin: Yeah. So pricing is a massive one. Like, people like it. It’s insane. It’s just nuts. Like how important that is in terms of not even in just in terms of like driving revenue, in terms of being able to do meaningful things for your customers in terms of opening up new acquisition channels. Like, you know, we were doing AdWords, but until we change pricing, which to be fair was relatively quickly, like the guys that we bought it from were like, AdWords doesn’t work really well. They’re charging $2 a month, so like maybe your.

Bronson: Conversion rate and you’re getting dollar clicks, you can’t make it work.

Justin: Basically. Like maybe you’re doing something off here. And so when you raise the price like it opens up all kinds of things you can do on the customer acquisition side. But even more than that from, you know, your better position is like a premium product that has meaningful things. You can invest more money in building new features, you can do cool things for your customers. Like what? What we basically did is we took a tool and built a bunch of like made a meaningful business out of it with actual customer support that we could afford to hire people for it because they’re charging money and like, you know, all these good things that our customers later appreciated. And you know that the net of it is like people in general. Are happy to pay you money if you provide them a service. I would rather pay some some company like 50 $100 a month and get responses to my support tickets then like $2 a month and have to wait a week every time I have an issue, you know.

Bronson: Were you surprised at how much the market could bear in terms of price? Did you raise the price in like, well, they’re still paying and raise the price while they’re still paying. Was that kind of your experience?

Justin: Yeah, I mean, definitely, because it’s one of those things where when especially in developer tools, it’s like very clear that, you know, we have built this thing and we will maintain it and we will make sure it doesn’t go down. Or you can have one of your engineers who’s making 120 K like build this within like three weeks a month and then have to maintain it for the rest of the time. And then when he leaves, you have to like train someone else. It’s just like.

Bronson: Europe is obvious.

Justin: Exactly. It’s so obvious. It’s like, you know, I am saving I’m buying my engineer’s time back for $39 month. $89 a month. It’s it’s brain dead, especially with how hard it is to hire engineers. So and.

Bronson: So. So we talked about pricing and that’s obviously a huge lever. Was there any other levers or is that kind of like the products built now to figure out pricing? Was there anything else in that mix?

Justin: Yeah. So the other big lever was adding an enterprise account. So for enterprises, I mean, that’s kind of pricing, but it’s also a product thing. Like we had a bunch of enterprises that wanted on premise installs, did that big lover. And then the last one that was huge was a really long churn reduction campaign. And so we basically saw that our churn was higher than we wanted it to be and you know, spent two months working it through the activation, the onboarding, like figuring out, doing user interviews, figuring out why people were canceling, you know, and then addressing those issues, doing win back stuff. It was it was a lot. But I mean, in the end, we cut to about 70%, which was just a huge win for us, like one of the biggest lovers, because that’s not something that many companies optimize on, like the good ones do, like KISSmetrics. You see them talk about this all the time, but you know, to a product built by developers, they didn’t charge them like wasn’t a real business, like they had some churn problems. So yeah, that, that was really a massive win for us.

Bronson: Yeah, I know there’s some cool takeaways from our break, so thanks for kind of diving into that, even though you’re not currently there right now. Now you also do a course which is like the perfect course for this audience. It’s a skill for marketing. So what is what’s actually the name of it, School for Marketers and Growth Hackers? Is that the name of the course?

Justin: Yeah, that’s.

Bronson: Right.

Justin: Yeah, exactly.

Bronson: Yeah. So first, what is school? Explain that to us. What kind of start there?

Justin: Yeah. So it’s so it’s basically at high level, it’s a database program. But like what it actually is, is imagine you had this is how I like to describe it to marketers. You know, all this like imagine you had an Excel spreadsheet that automatically logged like every single action that one of your users took in your app. You know, everything they did, like when they visited your site, when they signed up, how they signed up, what they bought when they came back like anything. And so what equal does is it basically gives you the tools to query that Excel spreadsheet. And so, you know, like all that is maintaining a database SQL is just the language that you use to pull information out of a database just like you would. You know the function bar in Excel?

Bronson: Yeah. So give us like just kind of a really broad example of a query that a marketer might want to run. What might they pull out of this database just to give people an idea of they haven’t used it before.

Justin: Totally. Yeah. So like something that is impossible to do in Google Analytics, like show me the last hundred people that spent more than $100 on my website. Like, that’s pretty hard to do. It’s even annoying to configure and like Mixpanel or KISSmetrics, but with SQL, it’s like available like select from this table and then you’re like, it’s two lines, so it’s like a four line thing in total.

Bronson: All right, so it’s programing. They’re learning a programing language that interfaces with the database, right?

Justin: Yeah. I try not to say that because everyone. It scares them. Yeah, exactly. They’re like, oh, Mark, oh, I don’t want to learn programing, but like in reality it’s like learning Excel or something. There are a couple of key principles you get down and you are immediately like ten more effective at becoming data driven.

Bronson: Okay, so how long does that process take? Because there are people watching this right now, a large number of people that they want to know how to use SQL. They see the benefit when you say that example you just gave, but they are scared of programing. They don’t consider themselves engineers. If they’re technically savvy to some degree. And let’s say they take your course, I’ll give you a plug there. How long does this process take? Because it’s six months. Is it a year? Is a two weeks? How long does it take to get up and running to do meaningful queries?

Justin: Yeah. So. One. I don’t think you even need to be that technically savvy. Like you’ll have a developer set some things up and you’re literally typing like into a box and hitting enter. So that’s one. But it’s literally like a. So my course is 2 hours at the end of 2 hours. People are writing queries. They’re querying a database. And there are like seven or eight commands that you need to keep on a reference sheet whenever you want to write a single query. But that’s it. Like you can learn a sequel in a day and start using it. It’s just like, I understand the principals have a reference sheet for how you use these different functions, and then the way is the way you combine them determines like what you’ll pull out of the database. It’s like, I sound like one of the scam marketers right now, and I’m like, it’s easy, but like, seriously, it’s really easy. Like, you can learn it 2 hours, you’re done, almost equal. Start on your resume and you’ll be like a way better data driven marketer.

Bronson: Yeah. So this has been such an interesting interview because you start out talking about the importance of brand and we end with SQL programing, which is like the four sides of this curve in the future. Are all the great marketers, greatest brand and SQL queries. Or does the future belong to just the technical people? Because that’s what it seems is being put out. There is it’s all going technical, but what do you think? How does it shake out?

Justin: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I think that being a technical marketer is extremely useful, like the only reason. So it’s extremely useful, I will say. So I got acquired by Rackspace and the marketing team at Rackspace like non-technical, but they didn’t have to be like I had to be technical because I was a start up. Like I was almost a one man show and it’s like, Hey, developers, we’re building our products 60 hours a week and you run like this little query for me, like, I have stuff to do, you know?

Bronson: And so I’m a relevant here.

Justin: Yeah. Yeah. And so I think that being data driven or not data driven. Well, yes, but being technical and I’m into marketing is like an incredibly powerful skill set. But I think that that is far more important at the beginning, whereas being a brand aware marketer gets far more important as you look at scaling and building like a larger company. Yeah, you know, like there’s a certain point where you can just hire out technical skills and it doesn’t become a necessity anymore. That point is not at the early stages of a startup.

Bronson: That’s right. And early on. And to kind of go into this a little bit, why is it that the brand matters later? Not early on. And one reason is building a brand. It can be really expensive if you’re using ad money to do it. So early on, you need to be more direct response. I put money in, I get money out and it’s always positive. And then you build up a little bit of momentum, a little bit of bankroll. Now you can invest in things that are more fuzzy and loosely defined and whatever and still get ROI and not really sure how it’s a different game. You can’t play the Mercedes game when you’re, you know, a startup at air brake, you know. Yeah, say this doesn’t you know that every commercial they ran sold X number of cars there. You know I’ve heard it said before by the CEO of Mercedes. He said if we stop writing commercials now, our sales will decline in 50 years. It’s like that’s a different ballgame because they’re building brand an awareness that, you know, we don’t have the money to play a game, even if it’s an important one to play eventually. So I think it’s just good to be a great marketer. You need to know why Mercedes does what it does, why everybody does what it does, and what the difference is.

Justin: Yeah, totally. And I mean, I will say, I think you need to be building a brand and be aware of like how you want to position in the early stages. But you know, the, the early stage startup branding game is entirely different. And like insurance, like insurance like has $1,000,000,000 to spend on advertising every year. You know, like most startups would be happy to just get valued at $1,000,000,000. Like when you’re when you have $1,000,000,000, there are only so many places in the world you can put that to reach people. And that’s where you get into like brand building and all this other stuff. Because I don’t even know that you could spend $1,000,000,000 on like direct response.

Bronson: If you could. I don’t I don’t think you could. Like, I don’t think I’ve seen on TV and other things, like, I don’t know, like relevant channels that spend that much ad money. I mean, I have a hard time spending $1,000 a day on Facebook sometimes. Like, I can’t spend a thousand a day. They won’t let me. They’re like, you’re out of people to in this niche market to actually spend money. I’m like, Well, all right, I’ll try again tomorrow.

Justin: Yeah, exactly. And so when you have $1,000,000,000, like that’s where branding becomes important. I think, one, because, you know, you want to get that in the consumer’s headspace and to like there’s almost nothing else you can spend it on, you know? Yeah, like, sure, a lot of that’s wasted. But I mean, there’s nothing else to do with that. A lot.

Bronson: Of options. It’s a different kind of thing. You have to know the game you’re playing at every stage of the process so you don’t imitate the wrong people. So you don’t want to be like the wrong people and say, Don’t pick the wrong strategies. You got to know where you’re at. In the lifecycle of your company and what kind of company you’re in? Well, just and this has been an awesome interview. There’s been so many really insightful things. I ask this all the guest is the final question. What’s the best advice you have for any startup is trying to grow?

Justin: For any startup to grow. Yeah. So I would say the best advice is just be aware of where you are in terms of your kind of growth path and then find one channel, execute on it until it stops working. And that’s when you start looking at like growth hacking techniques to hit the next stage of growth.

Bronson: Yeah, that’s awesome advice to end on and I totally agree. And there’s been a few guests in the past who said the exact same thing. Find a channel, figure it out, be awesome at it, then venture out and do something else either different or creative. So I think that’s a theme on this show of Find one customer acquisition channel that you know, and then everything else works itself out usually.

Justin: Yeah.

Bronson: Justin, thanks again for coming on growth of TV. It’s been awesome.

Justin: Awesome. Thanks.