Theory Ventures Office Hours with Raj Sarkar

[Music] I'm excited to welcome you to office hours a program where we invite luminaries from the software world to share insights these are one-on-one sessions with experts and they've been a huge success I'm Lauren deuse partner and coo at Theory Ventures and I'm delighted to introduce our discussion we've gathered questions from the audience more than 600 people registered for the event today and we'll chat in the Fireside format for about 40 minutes leaving in the questions you all submitted and of course please feel free to ask questions in the chat box on the YouTube channel page and we'll see if we can intersperse them along the way uh so let me introduce our speakers Tom tunguz is the general partner at Theory Ventures our $230 million fund focused on companies leveraging technical discontinuities into go-to Market advantages and prior to founding Theory Tom spent 14 years at redpoint as a general partner where we made notable Investments such as looker expensify Monte Carlo and customer we're joined today by Raj sharar a marketing leader with over 15 years of experience driving growth at some of the most well-known tech companies Raj got a start at Cisco Building their marketing engine before moving to Google where he helped launch Google cloud from there Raj joined several leading SAS companies including atasan and paloalto networks where he pioneered viral and guerilla marketing techniques to drive rapid user adoption Raj C the term outbound Fury to describe his Scrappy unconventional approach apprach to marketing that relied on creating controversies thought leadership and leveraging social media and organic challenges instead of paid advertising under Raj's leadership products like bitbucket Trello and others grew exponentially with that I'll hand it over to you Tom thank you so much Lauren Raj thanks for joining we really appreciate you coming on and just to give you the audience some background Raj and I were connected after I wrote a post about marketing teams as hedge funds and how Market marketing team should have many different strategies one of the hardest to execute is this outbound marketing strategy as successfully and Raj you sent me to your blog post which I loved it's called outbound marketing Fury and we'll put the link in the YouTube video but would love to hear a bit about you like you created this concept you identified a bunch of different key moments for many of the companies that you worked for and you called it outbound marketing Fury what what is outbound marketing Fury yeah first of all Tom thank you for inviting me here I'm a huge fan of yours block post especially I'm a subscriber and I've been reading them for quite some time I love you love your post on on startups and in general Venture Capital so first of all I'm happy to be here to talk about outburn Fury so outburn Fury is I think the technical definition of outbound Fury is being Furious in your outbound motion and here has like different kind of of tactics and it can be like content it can be video I think the biggest difference is like being a little bit controversial like out of the box versus following the traditional method of doing outboard marketing let's put it that way and I was fortunate enough to get introduced to this in my initial days at Google sry so how was it that you came to be introduced to the concept of Google was it something that you came across was it something that someone inspired you did you see it within the ecosystem so we were just chatting before this time so I joined Google Larry Page became the CEO and Larry's attention was all on Facebook at that time so Google Plus I some of you may remember this was one of those huge projects which you know Larry was very closely involved with I Jo just joined the Google Enterprise team and our team was obviously at that time were limited from a budget perspective and Google Apps was basically going after one of the biggest behemot like Microsoft Office had a huge War chest and the team was like okay how do we get attention right from customers so one of the one of the kpis we came up with is every single article or every single blog post talking about Microsoft Office should talk about Google Apps uh so that's how this whole concept actually started and what used to happen is we used to meet on a weekly basis like talking about what's going to happen from an outbound marketing perspective that week so it was very tactical in nature but hugely successful that's amazing so Shar so your first metric was share a voice every time office has mentioned we want to be there and then so you could track that over time and then the next guess sounds like you met on a weekly base how did you so that was your strategy what were some of the tactics that you used to drive that awareness yeah I have one specific example which I always talk about which like which was really funny on how we did it uh for example we came to know that remember Microsoft Office was on Prem initially I'm talking about 2011 and we came to know that because Google Apps was a cloud product and we'll always say hey if you want to be in the cloud if you want to be in the future you should be on Google apps they were we came to know they were launching their Cloud product and they named it Office 365 so we got into a room and we were like okay what should we do interesting what can anything interesting we can do to get some attention around this we somehow knew that I think they publicly said they're going to launch the product on a particular date and we basically wrote a blog post the day before the launch and we called it 365 reasons to use Google Apps kind of poking at them because we knew they were going to name Office 365 obviously we didn't outline all the 365 reasons in the blog post you can still actually you can still go and read the post I think Sean I don't remember the PM who wrote the post and we published it the day before the launch now guess what happened the day after when they actually all press first of all press loves Wars in general like Microsoft Google war and then every single press article which was talked about Office 365 they basically linked back to the Google post so basically we you know free eyeballs out of Office 365 Lodge so that was one tactics which I seen was like really successful for us that's a lot of fun it reminds me a bit I don't know if you've read the Ben off book I think it's called from the cloud or in the cloud and he also had this war right where he was Salesforce was fighting Oracle and seel and seel had a conference in the south of France and it was about an hour drive from the airport to the conference and so Benny off called the taxi companies and bought every taxi and made the taxi rides free there was a Salesforce account executive in each cab and there's a free ride but before you get to the conference you actually have to listen to the Salesforce right yeah I've heard that story actually yeah that's awesome and so how when you think about creating these content campaign there's judgment there right you can there's you're dancing a line here where you're kicking a Hornets n so you're taking a controversial position and you're doing it in a way where you really want to create a positive outcome for everybody and there are other examples within that blog post that you have remember man and it'd be amazing for you to share but when somebody joins a company right where there's a little bit of snark or there's a little bit of just like a little bit of bite but not too much how do you who how do you determine who has the right taste yeah to deliver that message how do you get to that good question Tom I think the first and foremost thing is this specific example works really well if you're a challenger right if you're number two you tag on to number one because number one has more mindset than number two this strategy might not work for every company like every startup out there right but I think the way you can operationalize this first of all let's talk about the content stuff which is a simp a very important example I'll give you specific examples which of content which has which is is very different from the example I gave you right so for example one during bit bucket know we git was celebrating like 10 years and we were like okay we need to do something interesting around this so we did it has nothing to do with bit bucket we did a get 10-year infographic and we posted it on the Block post talking about the history of get got a lot of attention on Hacker News obviously because it has nothing to do with bed bucket and then the I think the Linux Forum they picked up right so we got a lot of eyeballs around this content which had nothing to do about bit bucket I think people usually try to do a lot of selling in their content but if you do something interesting which just generate eyeballs for your product or your startup that's that's all you need I mean you have to be very subtle around this so this is one specific example of a Content a second specific example of a Content which is like fun and humorous right for example this is another example you'll see I put it in the block post there's this guy called Zach Holman who was really influential during the GitHub days basically he resigned and he posted that hey I resigned from GitHub because he was making fun of it I'm joining atlassian something and we like okay what can we do interesting around this like how can we generate some eyeballs so basically what we did is and this is like obviously you can't do it like as a marketeer you can't do it to yourself it's basically with the help of the engineers they basically created this mock yes put some stash luggers bit bucket luggers took a picture and then we posted it at bit bucket the VD bucket Twitter so things like that you can do like a lot of funny humorous stuff which you know you're going to get lot of attention like trell team for example if you see their Blog trell's blog was incredibly popular yes and they did write and the BL blog writes about stuff which has nothing to do about TR it has all there's a lot of interesting articles go around productivity and management and things like that so I I think the biggest thing you have to remember you want to do something like especially when you say outbound F you want to do something it has to be nothing you shouldn't be like overselling your product that's in whatever you do basically keep that in mind that makes sense so the way there's this great book called The Challenger sale which is about how I'm a challenger if I represent a Challenger within an ecosystem and in order to convince a prospective customer customer to buy my product or even take my conversation I need to frame the way that right the prospect thinks about their course base and what it sounds like to me what you're saying Raj is the outbound marketing fury it's a technique it's a top of the funnel technique it's not a bottom of the funnel technique it's top of the funnel and the idea is it's really about driving awareness creating parody in a buyer's mind yeah between two different products one of which is established and one of which is the upand comer and then building Trust in a way where you can use humor or other means to just get people to remember you get people to think to establish a brand a presence of the brand in a prospective buyer's mind right exactly God if that makes and then who let's talk a little bit about when you when you're putting together an outbound marketing Fury strategy what does that team look like you mentioned the tactics where you met on Mondays who who is we yeah so it's usually the way to think about this is a cross functional team right you need marketing you need product you need sales as well right and what you do is usually you put a monthly calendar already in place and in that monthly calendar you basically try to understand okay what's happening in the market kit anniversary is a good example right is there any like public Hol can you do something interesting around Christmas right so you basically lay out all the important stuff in that calendar you also try to understand what if your competitor is trying to do something uh during the next 30 days or not right and then basically you start to figure out okay where the holes are like maybe two weeks there's nothing happening like what kind interesting thing you can do in those two weeks right so this is like then you start thinking about stuff which is going to be interest like creating content creating like good example is sen Pat's day right s Patty's Day like bit bucket what can you do on sen Patty's Day so we did this interesting thing where you know how people use get developers use get they basically check in their code and when they checked in their code this map Maple fall greap popped up and everyone was like what what is this they started posting on Twitter right so you basically operationalize this entire process put it like a monthly calendar and then figure out okay oh what are we what's happening this oh this is the gap how should we fill out this Gap and this is where some of creativity and outof box think thinking sometimes makes sense so one question I've always had about a Content calendar and since we we're on the subject I'll ask you but within a Content calendar are there different personas that you're targeting so the reason I asked this question is when I was first starting to write the blog I was asking a marketing expert about about the right way to grow the audience and this person said said who do you think the best content marketers are on the planet and I said I didn't know and she replied it's TV so in the morning right and this was when TV was not on demand this is when you had regular broadcast TV but in the morning you had cartoons for the kids and then you have news and then you have the soap operas and then the news and then there was a bunch of stuff and so throughout the course of the day you were hitting sort of different segments and so she said you should extrapolate this out to over the course of a month is that something that you think through with just broadly speaking in the with this strategy or do you think it's you're targeting such a broad Universal audience that maybe personas matter less putting an idea into my head right now but we like to be honest when I was thinking about this we were basically looking at plg products and what is the core audience we are going after and that's how we would think we W even if we create yes there may be certain multiple personas we can talk like trell is a good example right Market teams trell is used by Finance teams trell is used by engineer so we'll think about that for sure but I don't think like there was a conscious effort of thinking about like personas the only person we would care about is user and buyer because those are the two biggest personels you basically care about but not at that granular level which you talk about yeah I guess it makes sense right because your goal is maximum awareness right right and so too much specificity for a particular campaign may not make sense with the Fe exactly so you mentioned plg how do you think about this idea that marketing teams are hedge fund what what we mean by that is in order for a marketing team to have success a portfolio of different strategies are important and some strategies might work on a given day just because there's conferences or it's the dull Drums of Summer and then some strategies might work in other and so having a portfolio allows you to drive a certain level of predictability for awareness or leads or whatever the core metric is how does the outbound marketing Fury strategy tie into or is how is it related to account-based marketing or outbound calling inbound how does it fit in yeah Tom this is a great question because I think that's the chapter two of outburn Fury uh because I've already started thinking about this I think it can be applied for ABM as well I can okay think about but you need to know which specific to your point which specific like companies you're going out after you can do it at an individual company level right you can create outbound Fury Steam for indiv if you want to go after for example top 100 Fortune 100 companies right you can actually create an outbound Fury for each of those Fortune 100 companies I don't know if you heard this example Tom brex for example wanted to attract a particular customer they put a billboard specifically targeting that customer for a single customer single customer but it's a digital it just displays and they took a picture they put it on social media so they did this is a good example of dating outbound Fury for a specific customer so you can basically adapt that concept like take the concept of our outbound Fury and you can basically work with your sales team and create a stream for each of the individual customer you want to go after that's interesting okay so let's take that bre example for a sec how much do you think that billboard costs is it like like order of th 5,000 digital I don't know if it was constantly displaying it okay yeah but I know it was a digital I think they were trying growth hacking again this is all experimentation it was digital it just displayed someone took a picture put it on tw Twitter and then you know the company so relatively low cost right we're not talking about like a 20 to $50,000 campaign here for a single customer this could be it may be even then if your ACV is 200 K forx done right and then if you sign a multi-year deal you might be able to justify it particularly if it's a named account one of the top 200 accounts and then the brand Halo that exists after that story exactly it helps you as well yeah I think that's a brilliant example of doing Arbon Fury for a specific C I think this is one one of the areas like where I want to explore like how do you extend Arbon Fury to account based marketing as well it makes sense it reminds me of Paul Grahams Mantra do things that don't scale because that little act you can't maybe you can productionize it but it'd be really difficult to productionize it but the fact that it's this bespoke campaign to a particular and then it received Broad Social Media attention in fact like an unscalable thing actually did end up scaling really well maybe and maybe that's one of the key themes of this outbound marketing Fury effort is you're doing things where they're unusual and they custom or bespoke and that that creativity is what Drive what resonates within the social media ecosystem yep yeah Mak sense so one thing that you mentioned that you know before and I think just ties into the your answer immediately here is that this there was a member of the sales team within your your Monday org and as we think about like account based marketing and focus the outbound marketing fury on an account basis I'm curious like one why did you have that salesperson within that meeting and two like do you think we talked about these messages as being very top of the funnel Sal sales person obviously at the bottom of the funnel is there continuity in the messaging that goes up and down the stack or at some point you kind of shift back to you classic product marketing message into the field support decks yeah yeah I think it's a good point I think the reason at least going back to the Google days the reason sales team were there is because they have a lot of Intel of what's going on in the in the market and that kind of helped because they're much closer to the Intel than we were so that's one of the reasons why I think some of the sales people were involved but again going back to your question like content uh for different phases of the funnel like you can extend easily outbound Fury different phases of the funnel as well right if you think about it I'm talking about more broad awareness because broad awareness is where it's the hardest thing to do as a startup once you bring a customer down the funnel it becomes much easier to some extent now that's why like the Arbon Fury concept is more applicable to top of funnel than it is for bottom of the funnel but you can like I was saying ABM like when you're creating an outbound Fury for a particular customer it has to be across across the different phases of the funnel right the kind of content you're thinking about for top of funnel may not equate to what you're thinking about botom of the funnel yeah so that makes sense so you can tie and I would characterize and correct me if I'm wrong but I think about the outbound marketing Fury is having a certain amount of irreverence to it which again like if you start with outbound marketing Fury you go down to Challenger sale like the whole new the whole part of it is being irreverent challenging the status quo trying to convince the customer that they should rethink their mental model and framework for buying a particular kind of software right and you've done that at security you've done it for cloud products you've done it one password another so the one of the questions is how much if any resistance that you you face from the exact team are people did you face any sort of concern that I might not be comfortable with this particular campaign or we really are taking a horn nest and we might get stung yeah you nailed it I there is a lot of hesitation in there is okay there is always a lot of hesitation in general because I don't think people are comfortable going outside because there is some risk associated with it there is right imagine that 36 five reasons to do there was some risk so like there there is always a possibility that it might backfire have to be a little bit careful the point is you will try out 10 ideas like eight of them will not work two of them will work and stick you like there is obvious you have to your point you have there is a thin line like where you're Crossing that line I mean outb like com like the 365 reason to consider apps may not be the right strategy for every startup out there let's put it that way there is always the possibility of a backlash so you have to be I think the atlassian examples are more like it's it's controversial there was I remember when we were talking about putting the green Maple Leaf for example the first time there were people who like on the engineering side hey that's going to break my coding flow it's like why are we doing this so there was some resistance to it but we were like why don't we try once so what we did is we tried with a small sample size first makes sense okay and there is always the these things think about it bra basically doing it like doing like another good example like doing it for one particular customer I mean I mean you can say the custom this is too cheap or cheeky or something like that but if you you are like that's the only way you're going to stand out in today's world is taking a risk and doing something interesting everyone else is doing like boring stuff like yeah you can keep doing boring stuff but that means you're not going to get any attention that's a whole point of Fon Fury that makes sense you mentioned there you expect 80 C 80% of those these campaigns to fail is that right 20% to succeed yeah it's like this Bezos has this Bas wrote about this in baseball there is a limitation on how much you can make like it's a home run but in in Tech you can get unlimited returns if it is successful yeah that's right so when you're with your teams you're framing okay on Mondays we expect 80% of campaigns to fail we'll try this week see see what happens and then if a message resonates do you continue with that message for some period of time I think yeah so the maple Lea example is a good example so for example we did the pride thing after that so we did it like two or three times basically tried to like replicate that idea yeah but like the whole thing around the Arbon Fury is you're not doing you're doing something surprising and different right if you just keep copying what you're doing then it's not no more interesting in any shape or form right so it has to be like a constant reiteration of ideas like again it's not always like a home run or zero like it might be just like you get a one like it can be just like you get 25% there or 50% there awesome okay and then measurement we talked a bit about yeah measurement which was share of voice so that's it's clearly must be a big component right especially you're the Challenger You're The Pretender trying to be come up and Dethrone the king so to speak what other metrics are important as you think about the outbound marketing Fury that would be different from a classic product marketing orm I think to your point you nailed a very fundamental question that how do you measure success and measuring success for an outon fury like these specific examples I'm giving you is very hard the only way you can measure It Is by looking at Impressions from a particular thing you're doing or if you have if you can put a like a it's a link you put a campaign flag and you basically track like how many clicks you're getting or you know like those kind of things I think the whole idea of outbound Fury is additive over time it's keeping a brand and so it's compounding interest one layer one layer one layer repetition so the we to look at whether you're making progress is trends. google.com as simple as that like how is your search traffic especially on your product name is going over time that's a very good way of saying hey is your strategy actually working or not over time and that's the only thing I think think about like for a startup right for a big company you can easily hire like an agency called like blue ocean and things like that going to go and measure your share of voice in the market for but for a company which is just just getting started the best way to look at it is basically trends. goole.com and you cannot you have to keep trying and you'll see like over time it it's basically it's having an impact from an awareness perspective makes sense great we've got a question here from a viewer which I think is touches on the previous topic which is how do you ensure that the fury strategy strikes the right balance between attention and maintaining brand integrity and let me add on to this question does the brand itself need to have a certain level of irreverence in order in order for this strategy like this like upand Comer chip on the shoulder you know a little rougher around the edges maybe do you need that to exist before it's good point because if you're building a brand from the ground up it's much easier to do this right if you an already existing brand and you're trying to do outb on Fury then it becomes harder right because so when you basically start off as like the First Market here in a company the first thing like when you're thinking about arban Fury you need to think about okay what kind of like brand attributes you're trying to portray as a particular product or as a particular company it starts from there basically to be honest hey these are like we want to be fun we want to be delightful we want to be we want to have a conversation with our customer we want to be approachable right we so these kind of attributes you basically think about and then the other thing you think about is like what from a thought leadership perspective what do we want to achieve right so it can be as simple as hey when everyone is talking about get bit bucket should be mentioned right or we want to be perceived as the git solution for professional teams like how do we establish that so you have to think about also there is some meaning behind doing an outbound F not just doing Arbon Fury for the sake of doing Arbon Fury right so you should really be thinking about what is the long-term brand you want to establish and then drive the fury strategy to that brand to be able okay that makes sense and what you said that resonated with me there is you don't have to be a I think of like virgin as an irreverent brand or there are I'm struggling for an example here but like a contentious brand somebody who's deliberately picking a fight you don't need that within the core DNA of the company this can just be a company that just has a different voice different view a different personality a different ethos within the Mark is that right yeah yeah exactly another question from a viewer is can you execute this strategy when there's an order of magnitude difference in pricing so let's say you're a low cost entrance I'm not sure if Office 365 versus Google Suite was that or bitbucket versus GitHub I in my mind the pricing of those two collections of products is relatively similar but do you think it works where you're the lowc cost you're representing the lowcost entrance messaging around price or value is always dangerous oh okay explain I think you may be perceived as the whole problem of apple and versus Android yeah that's right there is this from from as a brand marketer perspective that is the challenge around like how do you how do you position yourself as I think in your at least your overall I think it's price is more a conversation when you go down the funnel you know what I mean yeah that's that's a conversation for this so you wouldn't at the top of the funnel you should never be messaging price we are the low cost I won't do that yeah it can t it can tonish your brand as well it would it it rode the brand and It ultimately limits your options because if you're known as the low cost it's very difficult to move up Mark you can look at this companies right Tesla started at the premium part of the market and has moved down much more difficult for say Volkswagen to move up and especially for B2B like I think brand maybe consumer brand may be like Southwest for example they are known as a lowcost carrier but can you like spec I can I'm thinking about in my like back off my head do I know a B2B brand which position positions themselves as a low cost I cannot think of one actually so the closest thing would be open S there's a closed Source company and then there's an open source which is free at the developer tier right that might be the one place where you could say there is this and a bunch of people might use an open source Analytics tool as opposed to paying mix panel or GitHub or amplitude not GitHub amplitude and so there there's a cost Advantage but you're right like they're position more as being open source and the value proposition there is it's open as opposed to hey it's free get have never positioned themselves as yeah get up feels like a premium brand feels prium exactly that's interesting okay can you third question from the viewers and please if you have other questions add them in here how do you think about the outow marketing Fury and the in the analyst Community like the garders and the Foresters do those messages ever do they have intersect or is it are you wearing a t-shirt in order to conduct the outbound marketing Fury and you're putting on your suit to talk to that Gartner analyst great question remember again when there is a difference between user and buyer like the messaging you have for the user and the messaging you have for the buyer it's not going to be the same okay the Garder stuff is mostly for the buyers so your messaging is primarily targeted towards buyers who are going to buy your solution now as a startup like I think a bigger question like how do you get attention from godar because godar usually doesn't want to talk to startups in general so one of the few things because I talked to like Founders about this one is how can you get your customers if you have Enterprise customers to go and give card of peer reviews I don't know if you've heard like card of peer reviews is is basically very well established so that can be one way of getting attention from gar the second way to get attention from Gartner is usually if you have an Enterprise customer they have a relationship with Gartner oh I see ask them to give production and talk about you to their gner analyst and then basically you start getting like attention from them as well so that whisper Network yeah exactly so that's what would be you can get but messaging is for gner versus outbound F going after user versus going after buyer you may have to think about is it the same or a different messaging now I'm not saying you can't do outbound f for buyer you can do that but it more you know works very well for user for the user that makes sense that makes a lot of sense okay great and another question from the audience what is the appropriate stage for APPA can you execute this as a 10 person startup or do you need to be 50 people or 150 people do you need a certain budget do you need a certain team composition no I think this is the cool thing about I you can even like you what do you need you need a website you need a social media account and you need a product those are the three things you need in order to do a even a one person one person startup can do it you see this all what is a good example I'll give you one person startup show hn or hacken news that's a one person startup doing Ouran f right there right you don't need like like a army of people in order to do outbound fre even the founders themselves they can do it that already on LinkedIn if you look go to LinkedIn nowadays there is so many Founders who have become influential that's right yeah that's right and it's there it's the founder that's actually driving in right from Florida space right you can think about him who just very just yeah he's out there right present in the ecosystem and he's willing to take very aggressive aggressive position and that has that's part of the brand another sort of related idea I I'm curious if you agree or disagree but one marketer once told me the goal of marketing is to amplify the brand values that the founder or the seite is setting rather than create them out of the gate and so it sound it seems to me like if you have one of these Founders but Aaron Levy was another one right he was or Nick from gainsight right where they get up and they would they would stand on stage with different shoes andot fun with the music videos and it just he had a personality that came out right and it's different than Steve Balmer yelling on stage and Tom you bring up a very good point about brand and the connection with values of the company because your brand attributes and your value like company values they need to match they if they don't match then you're not going to be successful so to your point you're absolutely right I think the founders a very good example is like there are so many like out there people like alarm mask for example influences the brand of a company like crazy is a very good example so there are a lot of frers like they indirectly set they kind of influence the brand here and there and you said gave some very good examples actually as well makes sense awesome I learned a lot today Raj I learned a lot about marketing Fury you have incredible experience it's this is a technique that's really useful for topof the funnel education when you are an up-and-comer and you're focused more on the user than you are on the buyer it's all about expanding reach and connecting that to Challenger sales motion and the last part of it is even if you have less of an reverent brand even if you're more conservative brand you can still execute this strategy in a way where you can assert yourself in market and actually I'll add one more point which is one of the most important metrics when you're evaluating the success of this strategy is about share of voice it's about how can I get out into the ecosystem and create those seven or eight brand Impressions so that when somebody thinks about a particular piece of software a particular category you're in the conversation just as much as the incumbent n it Tom Raj thank you a thousand times this was a lot of fun to have this conversation and to talk to somebody who's had so much EXP experience in many different domains applying this technique I thoroughly enjoyed it thanks for the invitation Tom and [Music] Lauren