Strategy & Sourdough

What does it take to grow early stage businesses? In this episode we speak with Usman Sheikh, Managing Director of High Output Ventures about his experience balancing product and marketing for seed-stage startups. How do you get started with growth? How do you build a marketing model based on the right commercial returns? What does Usman wish someone had told him 15 years ago? Tune in as Usman shares his practical experience having helped scale multiple startups in the last 15 years, and provides actionable marketing examples from some of HOV's portfolio companies.

Distribution power of the internet and democratisation of tools for production have given birth to the creator economy, where the barriers to entry are super low and the benchmark for success higher than ever. In this episode, we discuss how increased competition drives commoditisation in almost every industry, why true product innovation is increasingly rare and how you can differentiate through marketing and brand building.

In this week's episode, we discuss the importance of onboarding and customer support for retention and why this is good strategy, and share insights from R/GA's latest research on loyalty that shows how great customer experiences have become table stakes and how communication is far more important than convenience when it comes to building relationships.

In this episode, we discuss on how true human insights and a strong founder ideology can drive irrational margins for startups. When should startups shift from pitch mode to brand building? Oliver shares his insights and perspectives based on his years of experience across marketing and brand roles at Zynga, App Annie and Grab.

How did a Swiss fintech startup used "radio test" effectively for a rebrand exercise? How does a "portfolio approach" and thinking of good content as investments help startups grow organically? In this insights-packed episode, we discuss with François Briod the transition from performance marketing to brand building, using SEO and localised content effectively, the challenges with brand salience in a transactional business model and the evolution of fintech industry.

How would your marketing change if you didn't have access to any data? In this free flow episode, we discuss why personalisation is overrated, how retention beats acquisition, our shared dislike of buzzwords and trends, and the concept of "extreme positioning" using single words.

How could a rebranding exercise help achieve $2.7m in annual revenue? In this episode we speak with Ksenia Larina, Head of Marketing at Lemon.io. She shares the story on what triggered a complete rebranding and naming change for the developer marketplace Coding Ninjas to Lemon, the challenges and opportunities of getting outside help, the inspiration from Mailchimp's copy guidelines, the lessons learned along the way and how they ended up achieving 40% year on year growth and 60% higher traffic despite launching in the middle of a pandemic. Don't miss this episode!

How do you figure out what to measure? How do you define the "metrics that matter"? Join us this week as we talk about the difference between measuring business impact, marketing effectiveness and optimisation metrics. We share tips on how to build useful dashboards for different stakeholders and growth stages, while avoiding "data puke". We also look into issues around data reliability and explore tools & techniques to measure marketing effectiveness.

Did you know that you need to influence on average 7 different stakeholders within an enterprise company before you can close a sale? We speak about marketing to enterprise buyers with Kerry Lau, an experienced B2B marketer who spent over a decade in leadership roles within IBM. She shares the frameworks and tactics for creating a demand generation pipeline. We also discuss the importance of marketing and sales being joined at the hip to solve the jigsaw puzzle, and how partnering with bigger players can help scale startups open doors.

In this episode we speak with Antti Toivonen about storytelling and what startups can learn from filmmakers. We discuss storytelling and character development techniques, and provide insight into how storytelling can be used to communicate better with customers. Antti highlights the importance of being human, and why it pays off to be stupid sometimes.