Folks, it's a pleasure to be here today to talk about growth on this panel called How to accelerate everything. It said that you measure what you value. And for startups, nothing is more valuable than growth. Growth is the key ingredient to raising capital, hiring great people moving up in the Silicon Valley world, that obviously creating some of the greatest companies on the planet. I'm extraordinarily excited today to have the distinguished growth panel, which you just heard, introduced by a colleague, Alex Wilhelm. And we're going to start with one of the most challenging topics that has come up in 2021, which is around attribution. This week, Apple released iOS 15. And last year released iOS 14. And those the iOS updates introduced several new do not track features into the Apple iOS ecosystem. Those features also make attribution extraordinarily hard for startups. And attribution is a core for a lot of growth. And so I want to start Jennifer baby with you just to get us going. Um, how do you think about attribution today, in the context of Allegiant health?
Yeah, it's it's a great question. I think about it a lot. First of all, Danny, and I think for us, so for a little context, elation, health is a b2b business, and we're working with other physician practices, but trying to partner from a sense, business to business. And so the way I think about it is, a lot of our attribution ties back ultimately to sales or acquisition if new physicians coming on to use the elation platform. And so for us, there's a lot that happens, obviously, prior to the sale, and we do a lot of work to map from when a user is anonymous, and coming to just maybe first learn about elation on one of our first party properties like our website, to when that person actually converts. And for us, when we actually see that person convert to a known user, is when we really start to get a lot of strength in our tracking. So that's when we can start to understand how that person became known to us. So if they responded to a search ad, or a Facebook ad or flee to he came in organically, and then can measure all the way through to our cycle or deal cycle if they take a meeting, multiple meetings, and ultimately, if they decide to move forward with using elation. So it's it's a journey we track. And a lot of it really just depends on the program and the tactic. But a lot of it starts with like anonymous users becoming known users.
And churchy have a point is sort of the same concept applies to you. Are you focused on sort of, you know, the starting touch points for customers ending touchpoints, multi touch? How do you think about attribution?
Yeah, definitely. I think one of the main things I've learned from experiences with attribution is that it's really important to start basic and simple. And then try to evolve from there. Right. And it definitely been in companies where we've made that mistake before. And the example I like to give with that is that, you know, if you think about attribution, like, say, a vehicle, right, it's, it's really enticing to try to build that Ferrari of attribution systems. But a lot of times when you're just starting out, all you really need is a skateboard, right? It's something that's simple, and they get the gets the job done. And we've sort of made that mistake at some previous companies I've been at. You know, one example from a few years ago at ctq, was we tried to build a medium mix model, before, we had something much more basic in place. And we invested a lot of time and effort into that with our data science team, but was actually, you know, after all of that it was actually never used and never adopted. And I think there were a couple reasons for that, you know, the first was that, at the end of the day, the ultimate goal of attribution is to measure incrementality, right, or how much incremental revenue is being generated by your marketing efforts. And, of course, a complex, you know, media mix model, multi touch attribution model is intended to do that. But it's hard to do it right. It takes a lot of effort and takes a lot of time. And for us, we had built one that actually didn't serve that need a better your mentality as much as possible. And the other learning from that was that, you know, as much as it's important to build the right technology, it's also really important to bring a lot of the people and processes and culture along with it. Right. So as we were building it, I think we didn't do as good of a job of ensuring that all the different business stakeholders really understood it. And as a result, it's hard to trusted, right? Especially if it's telling you that, you know, different channels or strategies are less effective than you think. And so, from that particular example, we sort of went back to the drawing board started much simpler, and then from there over time, evolved it and built into something a lot more effective.
And, Nick, you work with a lot of different startups. Do you have sort of a template that you apply to everyone, when it comes to attribution and thinking about attribution or, you know, does does the engine that you're building change radically depending on the kind of company you're working with?
Sure, yeah. So for context, we, we focus a lot on b2c or CPG, direct to consumer brands, more focused on on on the customers versus going b2b. And, you know, kind of what Shoji mentioned, a lot of it is starting simple and building on top of that, for the brands that we work with, which have, you know, a ton of different channels running, whether it's outside of just paid social, they're going into TV and podcasts and influencer and all these different channels, we've actually found that the best way, especially with iOS 14, and 15, which we're very not happy about, especially with those emails being hidden, the best way to do it is actually look at attribution from an incrementality testing standpoint. So understanding with holdouts how incrementally, you know, essentially, how incrementally good is a channel for us. And what that also does is outside of just giving us the data of what the platform says, you know, for example, a click or a seat were really less CPA or you know, how far they got down and to that funnel event, whatever that cost is, the incrementality. attribution platforms can actually help us to verify that and really understand, oh, you know, is the platform telling us something that makes them look good? Or is it telling us a real holistic number.
And I do want to remind the audience because we're on the Extra Crunch stage, if you do have questions for us, please put it into the q&a tab on hop, and we're paying attention, Greg is behind the scenes, sending me questions up here. So if you have questions for our panelists, please offer them. But shortly, I want to follow up with a point that you made which is about getting consensus around attribution. And the reason we're talking about attribution, of course, is that if you can't attribute marketing spend to growth, it's really hard to know where to spend your money, what to optimize, and what to improve. But I'm curious, from your experience, how have you been able to build consensus around an attribution engines? And what are some of the pitfalls you've run into?
Sure, sure. You know, I think a lot of it is, you know, that transparency is really important and people understanding exactly what's going into it. So it's not a complete black box is really important. But of course, at the same time building that trust that, you know, when we are investing a million dollars that we know what we're getting back to that is equally important. Right. And with that, I think that a lot of what Nick said around running a lot of holdout tests, right for particular channels for particular strategies that can help us understand right for those exactly how much incremental revenue or whatever else is driving. That has been, I think the, you know, a key part of that strategy. Especially because you can do that on a more incremental a channel by channel basis as well. You're not dependent on having an overall multi touch attribution model and media mix model in place before you can understand whether say your Facebook ad spend is working or not.
And I am getting a question from the audience, which is a lot of you have used the term incrementality. And they're curious what that means. I both curious on holdout testing, and incrementality if you could define it for some of the folks in the audience.
I'll speak to holdout testing. holdout testing is essentially the concept of saying, Okay, if we were to, you know, let's say you're running just to keep it simple. Let's say you're running on Facebook, Instagram, and Google, right. The holdout tests are essentially, if you were to turn a channel off, what happens to that acquisition cost? And how does that differ from what you're seeing in the actual platform itself. And the holdout tests really also help you both with channel specific or campaign specific measurement to understand Okay, you know, is our prospecting kit or is our retargeting campaign, really actually driving efficient conversions? Or is a lot of that, you know, is a lot of that juice coming more from the prospecting side. And the other thing it does, too, is, you know, if you're really making a big investment into a campaign, for example, you can actually be a little bit more sure that, you know, targeting, you know, these gios, for example, or these demographics actually does help you and is a meaningful place to spend those dollars versus, you know, versus versus targeting everywhere and thinking that it's actually working.
And on incrementality, when we're talking about that it's sort of similar to the holdout test. So you're saying take a paysmart benchmark, and compare it to the kind of incremental value of individual individual interventions and the growth marketing strategy.
Exactly. So So for example, if if you're running a person prospecting campaign on paid social and a retargeting campaign. You know is the retargeting campaign incrementally adding better, more customers? Or is it incrementally? You know, increasing conversion rate versus what what's being done on other campaigns already?
Jennifer, you you've worked extensively with b2b companies, which have a very different sales motion, then obviously the b2c and, you know, consumer product, good space that Nick is. And I'm curious when to how you think about attribution, when you're selling a product, say to a large company, and essentially there are hundreds of people interested in buying could get a sales motion underway. How do you think about growth in those contexts?
Yeah, I mean, I think to what Shoji Nick, were saying, though, I agree that like in most cases, you do have to start simple. So jumping into like a multi touch attribution model, even on the b2b side can be quite complex, when you know, the sophistication of the business or the buying might not be there from you know, senior leadership or your CEO. So like, for example, elation were very simple right now, it's its first touch model, we realize it is crediting a lot to first touch and his first touch when the person becomes known to us, again, it's like between a form fill or a lead scan at an event, but we you know, but it's a starting point, right? And it gives us at least some directional data to understand if that person brings in other people into the buying committee. So to your point, there could be multiple buyers. And then who are the roles of those buyers? And then ultimately, do they lead to an opportunity and in detail, so it's interesting, it's not perfect, Danny, but there's this thinking around, you know, there's one person that can start the conversation and that person can bring in an entire group of buyers right into the conversation. And literally, their Assigned Roles is the way that it's it's thought of, it's like, Are you the budget owner? Are you an influencer? Are you the decision maker and things like that. And that gives us an idea of how the committee together will ultimately buy or not buy your product or services.
And I'm curious on that front, because I mean, obviously, elation is a pretty scaled up startup, it's quite advanced, it's quite large. Why it's still such a simple system, is that a deliberate choice, or just one of you know, you didn't invest to create a multi touch infrastructure?
Yeah. So I guess you could say, there was actually no structure before. So one of the learnings I saw when I kind of got into the systems and looked was I think there was a strong attempt at trying to do attribution, there's an attempt to pass through like UTM parameters and some of our paid programs. But there wasn't really strong execution across across it. So what we saw when I first came in, when I first saw the data was that there was just a lot of data that was made, like basically, you know, showing one story that didn't actually align to what was really happening, I call it the blind was leading the blind. And so believe it or not, you know, when we went back and looked, and again, back to show display, making sure that everybody gets like, an understanding and a consensus around like how we're going to attribute jumping into like a multi touch attribution model was almost like overly complicated for the business to just understand, like, how do we acquire that lead? Initially, it's just like, that's what we're trying to answer. How do we first acquire that lead? So we decided, let's start with the first touch attribution, it was faster for us to execute so we can start seeing and then now we're having discussions as we go into 2022 is do we start to move more towards a first and last touch or a multi touch attribution, there's some tooling that we would need to maybe put in place as well, if we didn't move towards multi.
Shoji, I'm curious if your perspective also similarly scaled up large, large company, you know, we're sort of the attribution model today for point, and you expected changing in the years ahead?
Yeah, I think it's pretty similar to what Jennifer mentioned, for the most part, it's a last touch before the customers acquired type of attribution model. Right. But I think to me, there's, it's there's it's not necessarily just either one touch or multi touch, right? There's a lot of steps in between that is a while they can go down. And so one of the most obvious next steps for me after just a simple tongue, say last touch model, is there's a lot of, there's a lot of areas where you might intuitively know that just as pure last touch, does that make sense? So an example of that might be, you know, Google branded, right. So people who are literally just starting point, right, for the most part, they they heard about us somehow, and so it might not make sense to give you know, that credit so I think some of those things that were You can intuitively, you know, kind of understand and make adjustments to it, combined with running different lifts has an old lab test to then say, Oh, is this you know, is this really true? Or is it really not? Are some of the ways that, you know, in the past, we've enhanced our model, before getting to that multi touch or Matrix Model type of approach?
And what we're starting to get into, I think, key concern for a lot of startup founders in the audience, which is, you know, how do you get those first initial customers onto your platform, in many cases, you've worked at early stage companies that have grown to late stages. And we've talked about how it's important to sort of have a simple attribution model. I'm curious, like, how do you start to get, you know, for sure, G and Jennifer, in your enterprise world, you know, the first 10 or 50 customers? And then for Nick and your consumer world? You know, first couple 100,000? How do you how do you think about getting the people you know, over the line, who've never heard you at all, through brand advertising? And I'm calling on anyone?
Yeah, I mean, I think like, like, the first like, handful of customers. I think, actually, it's not just to do with like growth, specifically, I actually think it has to do a lot of it is like, does your product service or what you're offering have product market fit? That's like the first thing I think of it's like, do you have fit, right? And if you do have fit, the first like handful or a couple dozen customers will come in pretty organically, because you're addressing an actual, like need, right? So I think, you know, that's the way I think of it. And so a lot of it is it's this, like timing and understanding, right? If you have the right service, or the product market fit to address the needs of the customer. And I think the first like handful customers come in organically before you start to like apply a lot of like growth tactics behind growing your customer base.
Yeah, I would agree with that. I think, definitely, like Jennifer said, it's really important to ensure that those core metrics that are in place before starting to try to scale. So whether it's retention rate, repeat purchase rate, conversion rate, whatever makes sense for your business, are roughly in line with, say, industry averages. And I think at that stage, when you're just trying to get the first 10 or so customers, right, then you can do anything like hustle types of things, anything that doesn't scale. But once you're past that point, and you're ready to step on the gas pedal, I think it's really important to focus on strategies that can scale, right, more growth loops, that can lead to exponential growth, even without an exponential increase in effort associated with them. So and then I think also with that, for the most part, one of the things I've learned is to focus on as few channels as possible, especially at the beginning. I think that for most products, it's really one or two channels that are going to try the vast majority of our growth, at least a to become really large, right? And so the more effort and time and research you can go into putting in and figuring out what are those channels that make the most sense, that are the best fit for your particular product, your particular business model? I think that's really helpful. And so you know, as an example, point, I worked at a company called grailed. And we're a peer to peer marketplace for clothing. And a lot of people are searching for clothing items online on Google, right. So SEO and SEM were really big, like really great fit channels for us. So it became a matter of really focusing in on those. But both on the marketing and growth side, but not just that, right? It's equally important that other parts of the business are oriented around making those channels work. Right. So for the SEO side, there's a lot of product and engineering effort to optimizing for it, but then also enabling more user generated content. And for something like sem, you're paying for it right, the more we can pay, the more we're gonna be able to grow. And so efforts that we can put into that to increase our margins are also really important. So focusing on as few trials impossible as possible. So you can really orient the entire company around making them work.
Yeah, I would say for the consumer world, it's definitely a little different. You know, the one thing that that I've noticed in especially the last couple years as the drug of Facebook ads is slowing down. That you really need to build, you know, a foundation of a brand before you decide to go and turn on these growth efforts. So many of the brands that that I see launched today, you know, they're they're essentially they're their plan of acquiring their first 50 or 100 or, or even 10,000 customers is just Facebook ads. And the problem with that is you are essentially now a product company. You're not a brand, right and product companies Don't do well in advertising, because advertising or growth marketing is all about taking something that is that that, that is really nice or a really good product, or really good overall experience. And then just stretching it, I always think the best way to think about you know, marketing versus advertising as marketing is kind of your foundation, that's your, you go into to Google Docs, and you put an image in there, that's your marketing, but when you take it from the corner and stretch it, that's actually advertising. And the more you stretch it, the higher the quality of a picture you have to have in the first place. Because if you stretch something that is not that high quality of a photo, you're gonna end up with something that's really blurry. And so I think about that the same way with consumer marketing, which is if you don't have a foundation to start with. And that means building, you know, of course, is a buzzword, but building that community in the beginning, you know, getting to know your customers serving them and really understanding. You know, for example, there's there's a brand we work with called eight sleep, and it's a really great mattress company. And I have this thought of, you know, we should really go out and survey all of the customers to understand why is it that they choose to use aid sleep, and there's going to be about five or six answers that are the most common, and an 80% of the answers are going to be those five or six. But But then what we can do is say, Okay, now that we understand that this cohort here uses eight sleep, because they previously couldn't sleep, you know, seven or eight hours straight without being interrupted, versus this cohort actually uses eight sleep because they don't want to pay for AC and eight sleep is a better way, then now we can actually use that data to segment them and create even better campaigns. But I think the initial set of customers cannot just come from ads, it's actually got to come from kind of have Shoji mentioned that on the ground and hustle. And of course, there's platforms out there, whether it's a product Hunter, whether it's you know, using social channels. But once those are set, then it becomes critical to start really implementing smart practices around optimizing conversion rate and retention rate and acquisition costs. And thinking through those user funnels, and how are you going to strategically build your top of funnel? And how does that compare to what you do on the lower funnel side? A bit of a rant, but I hope that that answered.
No, I think that's super helpful. I mean, I honestly, this is the most humble panel I've ever been on. What you're saying is do less less channels sometimes even is small as one channel, you know, specialize in that don't scale up too early. And in many ways, I think that's that comes from this this ambition around founders, which is, you know, more earlier faster. And then what am I mean, he's sort of hearing is like, less, you know, more focused later to get it right. But obviously, with every startup that comes is kind of pivot point where you have found product market fit, you're starting to get a sense that the growth engine is sort of working certain channels are more functional than others. How do you show these phrase, I think you've called it a growth loop. But how do you sort of identify, you know, you've that you've found a growth loop that it's working effectively? And then how do you know that it's actually going to work? You know, continue to work as you scale up?
The old four second delay to call a nuisance you call the growth loop? Sure, sure. Yeah. I
mean, I think in terms of identifying what is the right growth loop for your, for your business, right? I think the first thing is that ensuring that it's a channel that's scalable, right, that as you continue to scale, there's going to be enough there enough of the right customer there for you. I think it has to be the right fit for your particular product. Right. So point, you know, we are a FinTech product, in the home equity space, if we try to adopt a viral strategy, where we try to get everybody to tell their friends about it, it just not gonna work. You know, it's a sensitive topic for a lot of people. But for something like points, you know, the average customer you find is about $100,000, and make a good amount from that. So there's plenty of margin for, say, certain types of paid strategies, right, in particular, very targeted paid strategies. And again, something like, just as an example, with point, one of our major channels is paid search. You know, a lot of people when they're looking for a solution for how to get access to money, they go to Google looking for that. And so that's a great way to find them. Another really big channel for us is actually a combination of getting a lot of credit bureau data, because there's a lot of data there about us, you know, all homers in the US and then reaching them via direct mail. But I think either way is trying to figure out what is the right fit for your particular product and also a particular business model as well.
I want to take a question from the audience. So Lionel ball asks gets directed to Nick. But I assume all of us can answer. But let's say it's Nick, what are your thoughts around delayed attribution, and he gives an example of iOS updates are making it harder to optimize campaigns due to the lack of tracking for those who opt out of iOS 1415, as we talked about before, so how do you how do you go back in time and retro actively sort of think about attribution for customers that might have touched you earlier? in the in the sales motion?
Yeah, look, it's a, it's, it's something to to do, it's, it's not that easy to do, I would say, it requires creating those pipes where you can take transactions that have come through and funnel them back into the platforms to get better data. I would say 100%, you know, if you can do it, you should do it. Right. It's like, it's like, if you can have a better engine in your car, you should go pay for it. But it's, it's probably not the easiest thing to do. I would say that's why, you know, I think relying not on what the platform say, but relying on on kind of a third party or a a, you know, a attribution tool, like measured, for example, which plugs into all your platforms, and gives you one holistic source of truth, I would probably prefer that over over that. But you know, something like that would actually help a lot of the data that that Facebook goes through to, for example, target better, that that stuff is helpful. If you can do it, you should totally do it. If you can't do it, I wouldn't say it's the end of the world.
I'm gonna assist. Jennifer, one of the biggest challenges, you know, in building up a growth analytic shop is, is selecting the right metrics for a company and and in your leadership role. You obviously have to interact with the CEO or founder, the board of directors in determining what sort of benchmarks to set what KPIs to judge against, and there could be a lot of politics that come with selecting these metrics, certain teams might be more happy, certain folks that work on different channels might want a particular set of metrics versus others. I'm curious how you sort of either intallation, or any of your professional experiences have thought through challenges around how you selected the metrics for a company?
Yeah, I think on this, you know, it actually really starts with having a shared understanding of the metrics that matter to the business. So whether that be the board or the CEO, so you know, or whoever, you know, in senior leadership, but having that shared understanding of what matters to the business, and what are we looking at, like, what are the company okrs? What are we focused on? And how is it the work that we're doing rolls up, right? So that's kind of where I always begin, it's like, get a really strong shared understanding of the metrics, and then start to think about what are the metrics that actually matter to the marketing team or the growth team. And so for example, like elation I want something that's a little bit interesting is that we're not actually solely just focused on around revenue, we're more focused around bookings. So for some people, they hear that and they'll say, interesting, so you care more about acquiring the customer, regardless of how much they're paying? And the answer's yes, that's the focus right now. Right? And trust me, you can argue like, Okay, well, you know, that's short term thinking, what about 2020? How are you guys looking at the business that and that could evolve, that could change. But our board and our CEO at this moment, that's, that's what we're focused on. Right? That's what's most important to us, which is at new logo acquisition or acquiring new physicians onto our onto our platform. So again, I think it just starts with really getting that, you know, buy in and shared understanding with your executive team, your CEO, your board, your senior leadership, and then starting to think about that next level down of how is it that the work you're doing aligns to those company? Oh, cares?
And choji? And, Nick, do you have been in situations where there's either conflict or what metrics sort of matter? Or you had the debate between different options?
Yeah, I would, I would definitely echo what Jennifer said, in terms of, you know, really starts with one matters at the company level, right? Because you know, marketing and all our functions are really in the service of achieving company goals. And I think that it's also really important to be very, very explicitly aligned about not just what the metrics are, but what the trade offs are across them as well. Right, push come to shove what what matters most. I have a particular example from when I was at sea cake A few years ago, where there was a particular month where you know, marketing was in charge of our gross revenue number. And we actually had a pretty good month, we beat our gross revenue. Okay, our goal, but what ended up happening was that, of course, higher marketing skills often associated with higher marketing spend. And in addition to that, there were some other expense items at the company level that were higher than expected. And so we actually ended up burning through a lot more cash than we anticipated. So well marketing thought it was a pretty good month. The finance side, thought it was a horrible month and an alarmingly bad month, right. And the problem was that persicae can pretty much all startups, right, we want to grow revenue as much as possible, and we want to reduce burn as much as possible. But we weren't aligned on, you know, what, what are the trade offs there. And so marketing and finance were working towards these sort of opposing goals, right, because they are often in conflict with each other, especially in the near term. And so we moved to a new structure there, where we had this gross revenue goal that we're trying to maximize as much as possible. But we set a instead of a cash burn goal, we set a constraint there. So we said every month, our burn was going to exceed a certain number, right. And then with that marketing, and finance and other teams could work together to achieve that goal, while ensuring that our burn number didn't exceed that specific number. So getting explicitly aligned with that, and in addition to improving some of the processes around how do we communicate, and stay aligned about how things are going. So that things start to be are, of course, we know it sooner rather than later helped a lot at the company level for us.
Nick, do you have any thoughts on that? Or do you want me to move on?
Yeah, no, I just wanted to echo the sentiment, Shoji mentioned, which is there are a lot of trade offs, you know, I think, especially in the world of CPG, or direct to consumer, you know, it's a, it's, it's kind of like SAS, which is, you know, you have a lot of money that you raise at the beginning, and there are a lot of high expectations of what needs to be delivered for the money that was invested. And also, sometimes there's, there's, you know, kind of a, at the at the highest level somewhat of a time constraint or a goal of, you know, we invested this money now, and in a few years, we want to pull it out, and hopefully, you know, 10, or 15x, what we put in, and I think it's, it's for better and worse, obviously, it's great for the investors, it's, it can be pretty bad internally, though, because, you know, for example, just an example with CPG is, with performance and brand, these are oftentimes the two teams that are really fighting. You know, it's like an internal battle a lot of times and while performance and brand fighting is usually a sign of growth, it also does things where you know, you might spend less today on brand marketing, and move that money to performance for, for literally hitting an Excel sheet that was you know, kind of created out of thin air, hitting a revenue number on an Excel sheet. And, and then now, you know, now let's say you've spent these performance dollars, the brand dollars that you would have spent this month may have had a better effect on the business in six months. And so there are a lot of trade offs. But I think the the biggest advice, and maybe tip and more of a plead I would say to the finance teams, and companies as please be realistic with a lot of the goals that are set. You know, obviously the finance teams are the closest to investors, and they're kind of also the investor relations team. So they're, they're communicating with investors about you know, how fast they want their goals to be hit. But a lot of them too, they come with trade offs, you know, a lot of times you can have a very fast growing brand. But in the long term, you know, people might just not care about the brand itself, they might just want a product. And, and I think those are things that don't really get talked about a lot when it comes down to looking at these Excel sheets of Okay, what is the what's the gross revenue we have to hit this month? Or how many customers do we have to acquire? You know, and the other the other piece to that, too, is, a lot of times when you try to accelerate things, or do things in an unnatural way, the quality of those customers you get may not also be the best quality. So you may have acquired, you know, an extra few 1000 customers, let's say, but but the quality of that customer, the lifetime value of that cohort acquired might actually not be up to par with where you want it to be.
When you're talking about realism, and I think this grexit a very important question, particularly given that our audience is mostly startup founders for these sessions is what are the qualities that are in a CEO or a founder, which really drives great growth, marketing? What would you look for as many of you have worked for multiple CEOs and startups? You know, what are the best CEOs and founders have in terms of how they're thinking about growth marketing, and I'm opening the floor to anyone who wants to answer that first.
I'll jump in real quick, I would say you know, the best. The best founders that I've worked with are incredibly passionate, they are not building this for, for return on investment. They are truly building it to solve a problem that they encountered, you know, somewhere in their life. And, and I think the, you know, obviously with smaller companies that DNA is what carries throughout. You know, the rest of the team and, and that early team is what essentially can become kind of your mini executive team in the early days, especially when you're less than 25 employees. So I would say the passion is a huge one about the problem that they're solving. Other than that, I think, you know, most founders are, are also very deep in the numbers as well, right? Like a really good founder, if you were like, hey, what revenue did you do last Thursday? They could tell you immediately, you know, we did this much revenue, we had this many customers, and Oh, we got across this error, there was a customer service issue where this person had this, you know, they just know their numbers really well. And they know kind of what's going on, especially as it relates between the business and the customers that they serve. Hmm.
I'll jump in, I think, um, yeah, I think I agree with you. And even to the point you were saying earlier, what kept going in my head is like your point around, it's, sometimes there's a lot of focus around capturing the demand that you forget about creating the demand, eventually, there's no demand to capture. So you kept going through my head, as Nick was talking about the brand strategy and investments that need to be made there. But on the CEO, friend, I think one thing that's important is just having a really strong vision. So it's being able to think about the vision and the long term and focusing on that, but also being able to operate in the present. So being able to run the day to day and to next point, like be able to say, Hey, what did we do today? What did we do yesterday and be able to be present, but having a longer term vision for the company?
Now, I would definitely echo that. Because, of course, with growth marketing, like I mentioned earlier, right, it's there to serve a company goal, right? And can only do that, well, if you have a good sense for what the company goals are in a very aligned way across the various functions, and where we're trying to go over the next few years as well. I think in addition to that, in terms of the the founders, just a really strong understanding of the customer, right in this space, and you know, what makes them tick, etc, would be another thing on my end.
So I'm just gonna wrap it up, because we only have a minute left here. I heard, you know, keep it simple in the early days, focus heavily on some of those early customers and realize that oftentimes, they come in, does Jennifer noted, organically if you have product market fit. So that's a huge sign that your startup is sort of hitting the right category, the right folks. From there, you want to be able to check whether you're finding the growth loop. So finding places where folks are starting to come in through different channels. It's efficient, and it's working well. And then we obviously talked a lot about attribution. And obviously, there's a lot of changes with iOS 14 and 15. There have been blaring red alerts going on for a long time in the media world about this, but it seems like most companies have been able to find ways of getting around that either by focusing on simple engines like first touch, or or sort of this sort of delayed touch or retroactive attribution kind of component. And that applies both for b2b and b2c. So lots of interesting insights, obviously really appreciate everyone here, Jennifer, Nick and cerchi. Thank you so much for joining the growth panel today and looking forward to everyone else here at disrupt