The Marketing Millenials: How to Create a Go-to-Market Strategy, with David Malpass
Learn how to set up a strong go-to-market foundation, avoid vanity metrics, and find excellent product-market fit.
Welcome to an in-depth exploration of the Marketing Millennials podcast hosted by Daniel Murray. This fascinating listen delves into the rich experiences and strategic insights shared by David, the SVP of Apollo, and a former VP and marketing leader across a variety of companies.
David's journey from a literature and poetry enthusiast to a marketing maestro showcases the serendipitous nature of career evolution, emphasizing learning by doing, and the crucial role of experimentation in marketing success.
Try out the Bash go-to-market strategy template
The Odyssey of a Marketing Leader
Fell into marketing through an internship during college.
Grew from handling support tickets to mastering SEM at Prezi, leading to wild growth.
Emphasized the importance of understanding the whole marketing funnel and avoiding vanity metrics.
Go-to-market Strategies Across Different Ventures
Shared his holistic approach towards different go-to-market strategies tailored to the needs of the product, market, and company culture.
At Prezi, worked in a product-driven go-to-market company focusing on unique technological capabilities.
Envision involved a creatively driven approach, positioning through content marketing amid competitive pressures.
Redkicks highlighted a product marketing and sales-driven strategy due to the early-stage nature of the company and the absence of product-market fit.
The Critical Role of Content
Underlined the importance of a strong, expert-driven content strategy in building brand, community, and sustainable growth.
Detailed the potential pitfalls of growth without a focus on activation and engagement.
Highlighted how HubSpot and Envision leveraged content and community to capture mindshare and drive significant growth in crowded markets.
David's narrative is a testimony to the adaptability, creativity, and strategic thinking inherent to successful marketing. It emphasizes a nuanced understanding of go-to-market strategies, the invaluable role of content and community, and the importance of aligning marketing efforts with business outcomes.
His experience across different stages of company growth, from startups to enterprises, provides actionable insights for marketers looking to navigate the complexities of modern marketing landscapes.
Read the full discussion in the transcript below 👇
The Marketing Millennials 229 - How to Create a Go-to-Market Strategy, with David Malpass
Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the No BS Marketing Podcast. I'm Daniel Murray, and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f**k up. Yes, it's great to see top of funnel. That's growing. Looks good. But let's make sure we're nailing the other parts of the funnel before we just go hire a bunch of gross people and spend $10 million on SEM and all that. So, but make sure you're considering the whole funnel there and not getting lost in that that those vanity metrics that that everyone loves to see. Typeform forms that break the norm. Get more data like signups, feedback, and anything else with forms that are designed to be refreshingly different. Learn more and get started for free at typeform.com. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. Today I have David on the podcast, he's the SVP of Apollo. He's had numerous experiences as a VP of multiple different companies and ran marketing for multiple different companies. But I'll let you tell, let him tell you the story. David, what's up? Welcome to the pod. Hey, thanks for having me. Tell everybody how you got into marketing, your journey, so that sets up the background for the talk today. Yeah, sure. So I fell into marketing, I'll be honest. I went to university on a soccer scholarship and English was the, no offense to English majors, I love English. It was what they put me in and I just actually fell in love with literature and English and poetry and rhetoric actually was what I spent a lot of time on in college. I had one credit to go. This was around 2008 when it was really hard to get a job. I was in North Carolina. I had one credit to go and they said, hey, here's an internship course. It's one credit and good luck. I was lucky enough to get an internship with the distance education department at the university and we were exploring new technologies to make distance education earlier. And one of the technologies we explored was Prezi and it was online presentations and a new zooming canvas and was really excited by this tool and met the head of the business side. His name's Drew Banks. He's an amazing guy. He actually went to my university, so very big stroke of luck. I sent an email and we got connected. He was in San Francisco and this was probably after like 200 job applications because you just couldn't get a job at the housing crisis. And I made my resume is what we called it at the time and sent it to him and he said, okay, I'll give you a job in support. So I started answering support tickets and the company at the time was about maybe 10, 15 people. There was the CEO, Drew, and the chief technology officer there. And I came in a full suit to San Francisco with my seersucker and he called every single person that worked in the office in there just to look at me and was like, this is what they do in North Carolina. It's a very different world. And so I started answering support tickets there. And after two weeks I said, hey, I've done all my tickets. What else can I do? And he said, well, maybe try newsletters. And so I started figuring out how to send newsletters. And then I said, okay, I've done this. What else can I do? And he said, well, maybe the board is saying that we need to we need to try SEM. And I Googled what is SEM and clicked on the first ad and learned about SEM. And I spent the first to the, you know, 30 million dollar there in SEM. And that kind of kept going all the way through lifecycle and sales marketing and understanding that the rev up side of things. And so I was really, really lucky to get a job at a company that at the time was tiny. And we started to grow pretty exponentially. We got to about, you know, 100, 150 million users, we're signing up for a million users a month, just wild growth at the time. I mean, for any time, wild growth. And yeah, that was my start. And I was really, really lucky to be able to kind of just do everything, just learn by doing. And so my rhetoric and poetry majors, maybe they helped a little bit learning how to persuade and be good with words. But I just learned by doing everything and by messing up a lot and eventually get getting it right. So that's how I got into it. But yeah, happy to go wherever you want. Yeah, I want to talk about go to market strategy, but I think setting the stage of what different types of go to market strategies there are before we can go on how to set up a actual plan to go to go to market. Yeah, sure. So maybe I can talk about a few of the different ones I've built. So at Prezi, it was this was a engineering driven company. This was when Flash was was around. And it's actually a big challenge to try and make stuff work before a lot of the new web technologies existed. But the company was 90 percent engineers. And so when I would tell them I wanted to do something or that marketing did something, they would say, I don't care. Where's the data? So that company was that was definitely a product driven go to market company. I think I left there and I went to a company called Envision, who we were on a tear back in maybe 2014 to 2016 or 2017, whenever whenever I was there and I joined and I said, hey, I joined as the marketing leader. There was one or two people in marketing and I created a three month plan. And the CEO said in my three month plan was first, we need to build out all of the tracking and data and analytics so I can prove the value of what I've done or what I'm doing. And he said, that's going to take a long time. Go do stuff. And so it was very, very, very different than than Prezi, which was very data driven, very looking at all the numbers every day. And the tool was actually not that defensible when it comes to the technology at Envision. And if you think about what Envision was when it started, it was basically a prototyping tool where you could link JPEGs together and emulate an animation for an app or a website. So like at the most basic level, it was hyperlinks on images. It's not that defensible. Right. Obviously, the innovation was the creativity and the way they put it together. But like the technology was not defensible. So there was four or five different companies that said, hey, we can do that, too. And so my go to market strategy there was very, very different where Prezi was completely defensible. No one else could do what we were doing at the time, whereas Envision was not defensible. So I had to create some defensibility within the company through marketing. And so the company had had some great products for sure, but we were more expensive and there were four or five different competitors coming at the same time. So we invested heavily, heavily, heavily in our content strategy was really as much of a marketing driven go to market strategy as it was a product driven go to market strategy. Of course, it was PLG before PLG was a cool term, but it was really about the brand that we built in the community that we built that set us apart. My goal with that, I told the board when I joined was I don't want to turn this into a horse race. I want to get so far out ahead in the brand that we build that there's no question that people are going to choose to choose our company. I told the board again, like I don't I don't care if people know what we do. I want them to want to be associated with us. So we've invested heavily, heavily, heavily in content strategy and our content marketing. And that was the foundation for for a lot of our growth from, you know, one to one hundred million. So that was that was a very content led content marketing led strategy. Eventually, of course, with our PLG motion, we built out the enterprise sales motion. But we really started with that that freemium model. And so, yeah, that was that was a very, very different world than than Prezi. And one interesting story is maybe it's not interesting, but one thing that I learned really, really quickly is that nothing that I did at Prezi worked at InVision. Nothing. Not one thing. And I was like, I got a playbook. I know exactly what to do. I've done this before. I'm 25 years old. What can I do wrong? And so I just nothing works. So we just had to completely reinvent the wheel. So I don't necessarily think there's one go to market strategy that works, but it's definitely it's very relative to the industry, to the product, to the motion, the maturity of the market, all that. So that was that was definitely an eye opening time. But we had a lot of success there and left InVision after a couple of years, but on an awesome team there. And after that went to where did I go next? After that, I traveled around the world for a year. That was fun. And I consulted with a company called Nexmo, who got bought by Vonage. They were a Twilio competitor and then Typeform, an awesome company out of Barcelona. I got to live in Barcelona for the summer and somehow they paid me. So that was phenomenal and ended up going around the world, ran out of money and was like, I guess I should get a job and came back to San Francisco with, you know, a few thousand dollars in debt and got a job at a much different company that was called Redkicks. And Redkicks was a really early stage company. I had realized that in my career I had joined companies that had already found product market fit and that it was just a growth story. And at Redkicks, we did not have product market fit. We had a great idea and 20 million dollars. And so we spent about a year whiteboarding, diving into product marketing and really understanding the different ways that we could go to market. Was it freemium? Was it a sales led motion? Like, what are we going to do here? And I hired a growth person, hired a product marketing person and hired a salesperson. And that was that was a go to market team. And we launched that from scratch through beta, a lot of feedback from early customers and then ended up selling that to Metta. And so that was a very different experience where it was product marketing driven and it was sales driven. We couldn't make the freemium thing work. And so we let a sales driven, like higher ACV, bigger deal size. So very, very different than anything I've done before. So I tried, like I said before, I tried what we did at Envision and I was like, all right, this is what works now. And then it didn't work. So I was like, OK, we got to figure out what works here for this company and for this motion and for this for this audience. So that was the kind of third different go to market motion that we built out. Then I went to Building Connected. It was construction software. And this was interesting because we had three concurrent go to market motions. We had our POG motion, our freemium motion. We had a sales driven motion that was kind of a transactional, you know, 15K deal size, two to three month lead cycle. Then we had our one year seven figure deal lead cycle. So we built all three of those out concurrently and had to structure the team very differently. But I felt lucky that I had had basically those three different motions in my past that I could build them all out concurrently. Went there to Autodesk through an acquisition and then at Autodesk partnered with an awesome guy named David Kane, who I'll shout out because he's a good friend. And we built out Autodesk Construction Cloud from scratch there. That was just a crazy rocket ship. We, Autodesk, had a wonderful sales team that worldwide field field ops. And so we marketed a product that didn't really exist for a few years while we built it and then grew to five, six hundred million in AR really quickly. And then left, took some time off, said I'm not going to join another company. I'm going to take the year off and I'm going to hang out and I'm going to rest and relax. And then a month later, a recruiter I really like reached out to me about Apollo. And I said, I'm not looking right now. I told you not to message me. And they told me the Apollo story. And I said, OK, never mind, I'll do that. And Apollo, of course, is an awesome PLG motion and a really what's normally a very sales driven space. It's sales. Sales wants to talk to sales. So we've been we've been building out that PLG motion and that PLSM motion. Probably the first time I've really built a super strong PLSM motion being kind of the last go to market motion that I've built. So every company that I've joined has had a wildly different go to market motion and none of them would have worked at the other company. It's been unique to the space, to the product, to the people. And so it's been it's been fun. Apollo is the current one. We're making it up as we go as well. But it seems to be working. Let's go into like how you mapped out a company that you didn't know the motion of what you do or how would you map out what type of motions, whether it's sales that grow, product that grow, content that grow, whatever. How do you start deciding what to plan and then how do you start making those pieces come together? It's going to be the most common answer ever, but one of the mistakes I made when I went into InVision was I said, this is what we're going to do. This is what works. And in two weeks, I alienated everyone. Who is this guy coming in and telling us what we're doing isn't right and that he has the answers. And then I tried stuff and didn't work. So that was kind of humbling. But obviously you got to go like if you're joining a company who is has found product market fit. Something there is working. Something about the motion is working. It may not be perfect, but there's something there. So like not starting from scratch, not being no pompous, but at the same time, you got to scale. And when it comes to scaling your company, if you found if you haven't found product market fit, find product market fit. Like that's step one, obviously, of go to market motion. Even at Apollo, we have a lot of small businesses where we look at in our for our smallest customers, you know, our one person founders who are using Apollo. They're all trying to figure out their go to market motion and we have to segment those very small businesses for do you have product market fit or not? Because if you don't have product market fit, you can spin your wheels all day long on your go to market motion and you still don't have product market fit. Right. So it's we have to look at the sub pool of our smallest businesses and say out of the 100 percent of total founders that we have, 70 percent of them have product market fit. Let's cut there and then let's help them figure out their go to market motion. So first off, obviously, please have product market fit and then figure out go to market product market fit like you can make most motions work. It's just it's not going to be as effective as another motion. So the most common way is what like you call friends as a founder, you call you call friendlies and you say, hey, try this thing like that's that's a go to market motion. It's not going to scale, but it works if you if your product is actually solving for a real need. So once you have that product market fit, of course, at the very earliest stage, the decisions that we talked through were how much how challenging is it to implement and understand this product? Like that's a big piece of it. I remember back in in 2010 or whenever the iPhone came out, it was like, man, all enterprise software, all B2B software should look like, you know, the. You know, the iPhone, you don't need a manual for the iPhone. Just you just press buttons and it works and it's like, OK, that makes sense. Maybe for a B2C product. But when it comes to B2B, if all you have is four buttons on your screen and like everything is, is that simple? Phenomenal. But it's very look at Salesforce. That's the least iPhone looking product of all time. It's the least usable product of all time. But I don't want to call out Salesforce. It's very challenging, although I'll say for my wife to pick up Salesforce versus. So think about how challenging it is for your product to actually be understood and adopted. And if it's challenging, you're going to need sales. You're going to need implementation. You're going to need people, basically, at least to start. And definitely if it's enterprise focused, you're probably going to need people involved in that go to market motion. You need to convince people to spend a lot of money on this thing, to go through the hoops of implementation, to trust you. But if your product can be understood and implemented and is not an incredibly technical thing to do, I think PLG is a great option for you. We are investing heavily, for example, right now in our knowledge base and in our content team, because we want to create an academy. Go to market is really hard to set up. I'll say that. And people are setting up go to market on Apollo. And so we are struggling with that firsthand. How do we help all of these people? They definitely have heard about Apollo. They want to use it, but then they try to. And they're like, I don't know what to do. So we could throw, you know, thousands of implementation people and salespeople and one on one trainings at these people, or we can figure out a way to do it one to many. And we really believe strongly in PLG. So if we can help people self service, then we can hopefully have a lot more efficient of a business in our go to market motion than if we have to go hire an army of people. So I think it really depends on the complication of your product, the existing market, for sure. But I'd say at the very beginning, like there's nothing wrong with throwing people at a problem until you figure that out and then automate it. I think a lot of people, what they do when they think of go to market, the first hire they think about is I need to hire a growth person, but sometimes hire a growth person and you scale too quick. You can have the problem that they don't understand your product. They don't understand how to use it. And you're scaling so quick that you can't scale up content fast and have product marketing fast. So how do you decide what teams to start with based on these motions? I think that's I see a lot of people say I need a growth person. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Nobody even understood that you need to be able to set the foundations of understanding your product before you can even scale this product. Yeah, I can't recommend a really, really good product marketer enough, especially in those early stages. They're going to understand the competition. They're going to understand what they're doing. You're going to be able to look at what's working for other companies, understand the audience rather than just apply this, you know, one size fits all go to market on growth. Like, hey, let's spin up some ads and create a blog. And like, OK, is this even the right motion? Are we going to go invest however many dollars in a motion that doesn't really work? Prezi was like that. Actually, we grew too fast and we were growing so quickly that, you know, we got to one hundred and fifty million people were using this or had tried this thing, not we're using this thing. And we could not figure out activation, for example. So it was just too hard. So people I was 22 at the time. So pardon my analogy. But when I was doing marketing there, but my analogy when I was 22 was like we invited everyone to a party. It sounded awesome. And then all the all the kids got there and there wasn't any beer. They left. And next week when we invited them back, they're like, no, I'm good. And so basically we everyone had heard Prezi is amazing. Go try it. And they tried it and couldn't figure it out. So they left and to try and convince them to come back was almost impossible. So we actually invested and grew too quickly at Prezi, which was a detriment to that business. And, you know, at any given time, we had a few few million people signing up each month, but it was a very high turn rate. So figuring out the activation motion, figuring out like the parts of the funnel that aren't sexy, that aren't the vanity metrics and then, you know, priming your company for growth, I think, is key. And it's really easy to get lost in these vanity metrics. But of course, right now, when people don't have budget, people are turning. Attention is an efficiency is what people care about. I'll say right now, if you look at our hiring plan at Apollo, we're like, hey, we're our top of funnels growing. That's great. Like we could go pour 20 million dollars on that top of the funnel. But let's go nail the content strategy. Let's go nail the product marketing. Let's go nail the activation. And so if you look at our open roles, it's like almost all content and product marketing is that's what we care about. Like, yes, it's great to see top of funnel that's growing. It looks good. But let's make sure we're nailing the other parts of the funnel before we just go hire a bunch of gross people and spend 10 million dollars on SEM and all that. So look at the whole funnel. If you join somewhere new, there's going to be a lot of low hanging fruit, a lot of low hanging fruit. And but make sure you're considering the whole funnel there and not getting lost in that, that those vanity metrics that that everyone loves to see. I think like people forget that marketing is the whole picture. It goes beyond that sales. You have to understand onboarding. You have to understand retention. You got to understand referrals. You got to understand why people are talking about you. You understand all that stuff. Because, for example, when I was at service Titan, we could scale a lot, but they weren't like necessarily like perfect for our product, some people. So we just didn't scale those people until we got to the product to a certain place. But there was so much demand for a product like that. We could have just poured money in as a marketing team. And I looked at onboarding how the product could have served the people retention. But instead, we we focused on who would be most successful first and then started scaling up as we got product better, product marketing, better content, better all that experience better. Absolutely. It's such a good call out that especially with products that can be used by lots of different types of customers. Right. Like Apollo is another good example. We can go after C.S. We go after marketers. We go after salespeople. We go after SMBs. We go after mid market enterprise. And it's to be unfocused there and just say, hey, let's widen the top of the funnel as much as possible, like and not look at who our core, most retentive, most valuable customers are. And really focusing there, I think, would be a be a big mistake. There was one other example. I remember when I was at Prezi, that was at the time I was just caring about the top of the funnel. I was like, go as fast as possible. We created a bunch of scrapbooking templates. It was a presentation software. We're like, man, we're signing up 4,000 people a week for scrapbooking and showed the CEO and he was like, what the hell are you doing? Like no one cares about people that are here for scrapbooking. There's there's not money in that. That's not even close to our target audience. I was like, 4,000 people a week. And he was like, stop everything you're doing right now. And never do that again. So it's a good point. More ways to grow your business with Typeform. Collect more and better data with forms that embed where people see them from web to email, Typeform can help you ask the right questions at the right time to reveal deeper insights about your customers and prospects. Learn more and get started for free at Typeform.com. I want to go into the content side of things and the why between the importance of content, because I think that's getting lost in a lot of marketing teams, too. A lot of marketing teams I hear about only talk about, especially B2B, is how do we get Meta great? How do we get LinkedIn ads good? How do we do this? How can we do that? But they don't nobody. And they always think of content as like, OK, it's a blog or it's this, it's that. It's not a center of their strategy. So how are you making that a key part of your strategy? There's a few things happening, right? Budgeted search ranking, we know all these things. And so a lot of companies, especially in the last couple of years, have just restricted all of their efforts to as close to revenue as possible, like capturing existing demand and doing SEM. And that's where the budget goes. First of all, I don't think that's like preparing you for long term growth. Where are the leads? Where's the brand? Where's the leads going to be in a year once that demand is dried up? That's like an obvious thing. I'll say I am very passionate about content and brand. And there's easy examples that I'm sure you've probably covered on the show. Like, look what HubSpot did with InVal. You know, they just came in and took over with this new thing. And that's been like the guiding marketing strategy for a lot of businesses for the last 10 years or so. And I think if you look at how they invested in their marketing, 35 people in content, five in DG. And I'm sure I got those exact numbers wrong. Our head of talent is actually from HubSpot. He hired all of them. But it was just vastly, in a very crowded market, like marketing automation is about as crowded as it gets. They really differentiate it through content. I'll say we did the same thing in InVision. We rode a wave of product design becoming really important to businesses. Same thing I was mentioning, the iPhone came out. They're like, wow, look at the usability, it matters. And we rode that wave and we just, we captured all of that mindshare by saying product design is the future of business. I think even, we went as far as making a movie about it. And that really propelled our brand, just made it not even close. If you were doing product design, you wanted to be associated with InVision. We hired all the top product design thought leaders. And we said, you work for us now, and you're writing for us now. And created a real big community around it. So, I think especially for PLG companies, but really any company where word of mouth is more important than ever. For any company, word of mouth is more important than ever. It's just hard for a lot of companies. The way to create word of mouth is through a content strategy, a brand, and a community. And it's a lot better to not pay $25 a click for people coming in to even consider you. It's a lot better to not do that and to, it's not one or the other, right? But it's a lot better to have word of mouth and your champions and your community and your content be that driver of awareness. So, it's hard. You have to have a point of view. It has to be a little bit controversial. It needs to be, it needs to stand out. You can't just, like you said, you can't just be doing another blog with that chat GBT's writing. If you can have a little bit of a controversial of a point of view and you can back it up with your product strategy and marry them, then you can really do a lot with word of mouth and content. So, we're hiring a lot there. And we're, I'll mention some, I'll name drop a little bit. Like Josh Garrison is, he understands sales better than most people I know. He's running our head of content. He was in sales forever. And so, I didn't hire a content person necessarily to do that. I hired someone who's an expert at sales and who has really strong opinions. And so, he's leading our content strategy. We're not just doing a blog. We're building out an academy. We're doing a lot of stuff I can't say right now. But the other advantage I'll say in that with this is, when you create a strong content strategy and brand and community, you get to detach yourself a little bit from needing product to market. If your whole marketing strategy is just paid acquisition for the products that you have, you run out of time. You run out of activities. You run out of budget. You're limited by how often you launch a product. Like, hey, we launched a product. Now, we email everyone. Now, we create new ads. All right, what's next in the launch? When's the next launch? Well, it's, you know, launch got pushed. It's not gonna be ready. The beta users didn't like it. And so, you're like, okay, well, we can't do marketing anymore. We're at the mercy of product. But if you can do it, if you can create a really strong content strategy and community, you don't need product. Like, that's a bonus. And so, that's a lot of what we're doing right now. I'll say last year we really relied on product for marketing. And this year, it's gonna be much more of a content strategy and community-driven strategy. I think one point you made that was really great is that you hired the content person who's been in sales. Because I always say that the number one most important thing for B2B content is expertise, especially now more than ever. Like, five, 10 years ago, you can get away with writing an article because there wasn't that many articles in there. But now you have to actually have strong opinions in the market. You have to have strong leadership. You have to have a point of view. Some of it has to be original point of view. Some of them could be like, point of views that are shared in the market that everybody believes but nobody's saying. But some of them have to be like, this is how I would use sales. And you need someone to do that. And that's what Gong did with Devin Reed. He was a sales guy. So, the best content usually comes from expertise or having experts in your team that can guide the content. Because otherwise, people sniff the BS from our, you can't build content on that. One of the things I always told the content team at Envision, it was design software and design app. And I would always say, no one in design wants to hear what a marketer has to tell them about design. No one. So, we went and hired a bunch of design thought leaders. And similarly, at any company I've been in, no one wants to hear what a marketer has to tell them about their job. Sales doesn't wanna hear what marketing thinks about sales. I mean, parts of it, but you know what I mean. And before that was construction. Construction, our main user was like a 50, 40 to 55 year old owner of a construction company. They don't wanna hear what a bunch of 25 to 35 year old San Francisco people have to tell them about construction. So, you can lose that credibility really quick or you can create it. So, I think product marketing is huge there. And by product marketing, I mean, not just conventional, here's the product, but understanding the market and the audience and really becoming subject matter experts in product marketing. And that's possible. It's possible for a marketer to become an expert in a market. It's gonna take a long time, but that's not necessarily the person who's writing the content. It's not necessarily a traditional marketer who you find for that. So, I completely agree. You know, one of my good friends who's in product marketing always tells me and her like strong opinion is that product marketing is less about marketing, it's more about strategy because it's understanding customer, it's pricing, it's packaging, it's understanding the motion, understanding why people are using the product. It's less about like doing the marketing efforts and tactics. It's more about setting the strategy so everybody in marketing could use that data and use that, those things to do better marketing. That's why it's so important. Yeah, I completely agree. And that's why you see so many product marketers become, you know, CMOs. you know CMOs and that's that's a very normal path and I always another bad saying is is that product marketing is the connective tissue within the organization and they're the liaison between everything and luckily I have an awesome leader in Hallie, Hallie Pinnaud who understands that for sure I would be lost without product marketing I'll say that. For someone who like you came into a company early and was just figuring out what are some steps that you took to just figure it out because I think a lot of marketers out there just figuring it out right now. There are going to be very strong opinions in a small company who are figuring things out and I'm sure you can guess whose opinion will be strongest but it's a lot of one-on-one time with with the CEO honestly and depends on what sort of funding you have but you got to be able to convince people to spend some money and of course we did all of the the usual things we we had wonderful advisors and a wonderful board who would help us get potential customer interviews and kind of understands what their pain points were and what they were using and what their buying process looked like so there's a ton of research that of course happens. I think when it comes time to we think we might have product market fit but we got to find some people to use it to see if we truly do that's when I think it becomes valuable to spend a little bit of money and that's when I think paid is actually really useful. If you have a product you have a funnel that actually works you can at least take a demo call then then spend a little money like there's so much demand that you can just capture that you can validate really quickly your assumptions and so I'll say Redkicks for example we spent a lot of money on PR and you know did all of the the traditional things for our first ever kind of GA launch of that product it was a GA beta so it was really a beta launch but it was our coming out party we had been in stealth mode the whole time I just said like I need two thousand dollars so we did like a soft launch with two thousand dollars and we just looked at like very obvious keywords that people are already looking for something that you do so you can find out pretty quickly if it's you know a free trial sign up you can actually see what they're doing or if it's a sales funnel you can get some feedback from people that aren't friends and are gonna give you like real feedback and you're gonna see what a real sales call is gonna be like you're gonna see people be like what the hell are you doing this doesn't make sense whereas a friendly might be like oh okay I get it I do recommend that's a good time to spend a little bit like a very controlled test and to understand if you truly have product market fit if this motion even works get for a couple thousand dollars you can get a lot of feedback you can get a lot of people using the thing and trying the thing and in our case we got a few champions who actually we could work with both for feedback and and to perpetuate it within their organization I think spending actually a little bit once you feel like you have product market fit is a good idea but you got to be able to get buy-in from whoever is funding it that you shouldn't expect you know 5x ROI on this it's like this is you should expect basically what you're spending on R&D like this is in prep for go to market it is one of the best ways to test messaging too absolutely and see because you can send out a bunch of little ads spend a little bit on those ads and see what is hitting and what is not in the market and find out what messaging works without blowing your budget like back in the day you would have to get a tv ad or a radio ad to just figure out if you're and you couldn't even tell if your messaging was worthy but now you can run a small test online and figure out with a couple thousand bucks like is this going to work or not you can even do that at larger companies right like we geofence things and we spend some money and see if it works if we want to test different pricing and packaging let's not roll it out for everyone let's let's see what uh Vancouver thinks or let's see what Portugal thinks you know and de-risk a lot of the decisions that we make by by spending a little bit of money what is that marketing hill you would die on I got so many hills that I would die on one that I would die on that is that it's not brand or growth it's not like investing in brand because you can't track it isn't going to catalyze demand gen it's not like investing in demand gen is different than investing in brand or investing in scm is different than investing in brand I think it's all it all catalyzes each other and that if you're doing demand gen right you're doing paid right you're doing performance marketing right it should be a catalyst for the brand if you're doing brand right it should be a catalyst for your for your bottom of funnel demand gen efforts so that's certainly a hill I have a lot of hills though I think uh companies that are failing through and I guess in a similar vein companies that are failing to invest in the top of the funnel because they can't track that is uh you know preparing to the failure to prepare for the future is preparing to fail like you're you're you're really going to drive your funnel you're going to capture all the demand that that already exists and it's not true demand generation it's demand capture so I would say invest in demand generation not just demand capture as another one I got one more that I'll die on stop spending 90 percent of your time trying to get the perfect attribution model because it doesn't exist you know you got to be okay with like 80 percent you got to say here is an attribution model that we all agree is good enough unless we're going to spend two years and a million dollars it's never going to be perfect so you got to be okay with a little bit of ambiguity and at least directionally know what's going on my last question is where could people find you and what you're doing and what Apollo up there yeah obviously uh Apollo.io we're trying to make world-class go-to-market accessible to everyone we're all in one from from marketing to sales to rev ops help you go build your business from scratch it's free to start it's free forever actually on certain plans and we're growing like wildfire because we're taking what used to be limited to the best companies in the world with all the money to really go spend millions of dollars on go-to-market we're bringing that to everybody so that's really our goal and our vision is let's make this world-class bit of market really accessible to any single person in the world and let's help people grow their business so check it out we're going like crazy because we're actually delivering those results so check us out at Apollo.io and of course you can you can find me on LinkedIn I'm sure it's David Malpass and it's not the world bank president it's the other one thanks so much for listening tune in next week to hear more great insights from marketing's coolest operators if you haven't already please consider subscribing to the Marketing Millennials podcast and giving it a five-star rating it helps bring more marketers into our community