Philippe Gamache  0:00  
Yo

Philippe Gamache  0:07  
what's up guys, welcome to the humans of martec podcast. His name is John Taylor. My name is Phil ganache. Our mission is to future proof the humans behind the tech so you can have a successful and happy career in marketing

Philippe Gamache  0:25  
What's up everyone today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Amrita Mathur, VP of Marketing at clickup and Rita kicked her career off at open text in Toronto where she or many different marketing hats and later progressed to red knee. As a product marketing manager she briefly shifted to customer success at Jonas software concentrating on customer growth, retention, and later return to Product Marketing at Toronto Region Board of Trade. She then became Director of Marketing at price metrics, a McKinsey Company where she led marketing planning and team hiring. She also led demand gen at Vision critical where she focused on go to market strategies demand gen and martec. And Rita then moved over to top hat as VP overseeing demand gen marketing ops as well as growth. She then joined a startup called consise. Founded by two Norwegian entrepreneurs who secured seed funding from Sam Altman and the slack fund. She led the rebrand for the company to suicide, and built a team that helped the startup grow from zero to 4 million in year one and up to 60 million by year four. Finally, and Rita has recently joined San Diego based click up the powerful productivity platform valued at over $4 billion known best for their Superbowl ad and their music album, Emerita. I know you've had a hell of a busy month this month. Thank you so much for your time, really appreciate it.

Amrita Mathur  1:45  
Thanks for having me. And that wow, my whole life just flashed before my eyes. That was just like that's what I've done my whole life and my career.

Philippe Gamache  1:52  
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Amrita Mathur  3:42  
Well, yeah, my first start, I know you said open taxes because the funny story is I used to work for a company called Xenos horrible name with an X. And I was like, Is this a Ode to xenophobia? Like what is this? But anyway Xenos got acquired by a company also that doesn't exist anymore and they got acquired by open so it's been like Yeah, it's like the shark eating tuna that uniting though baby fish. Gotcha.

Philippe Gamache  4:06  
Yeah. Good. Just updating the company names and it looks like it was open text from the start of your career. Yeah,

Amrita Mathur  4:12  
exactly. So I've been in startup my whole life I'd say this. This job at clickup is like my first proper like big tech big company jobs. They're not even actually that big. Like we're like under 1000 Well, I think we're like 800 Yeah,

Philippe Gamache  4:28  
still definitely bigger than a lot of the startups that you at least like started your career at and I know that you know $4 billion valuation no big deal 1000 plus people you're almost in this like ivory tower now at the VP level big tech maybe missing getting your hands dirty. How do you find the role so far? Are you still getting your hands dirty? Walk us through the

Amrita Mathur  4:50  
yes, there is no ivory tower. It's a fallacy. I'm I'm the janitor and the VP and the copywriter and all sorts just enough. I think the the thing I click up is a bit unique, where it's a, it's a very flat or you know, I think everybody all big tech has been stripe if I'd I don't know if that's a bad word, but like it's sort of like the stripe model like everything's super flat, even though there's growth loads, everybody has visibility and Darby saying is like very operationally focused, especially given what we do. But it's like, everyone's in the ops and everyone's kind of like, knee deep in it. And our CEO talks a lot about you know, people. He he says, a very simply, like, people need to be in the details to be effective, you need to be in the details. He's like, we can't like skim surface level, like you have to know, all of the ins and outs of everything otherwise, like, don't show up, you know, so, no, there's no, I wouldn't say there's remotely anything like an ivory tower, I would say if anything, maybe at the end of my thing at Supersite. After four years, maybe there was some ivory tower where I could like literally, like walk away from something because the team's got it. But no, no, no such pleasure here.

Jon Taylor  6:10  
One of the things we talked to with a lot of our guests, and I love your perspective is just this concept of testing and growth marketing. You know, we often talk about and kind of joke, you know, off handedly, that if you have a disagreement on marketing, just go ahead and test it. But not everything has to be a test. Right. But with clickup volume of signups and web traffic, no doubt that you guys have the velocity be able to test things. So maybe walk us through kind of your approach to testing and what things need to be a test with things, we can just make decisions as marketers?

Amrita Mathur  6:43  
Yeah, that's a great question. I think there's this fallacy in marketing that everything should be tested. I think you've kind of alluded to that just now. That is not possible. And I think it can kind of drive you a bit nuts. And it actually pushes out decision making quite often we do have high volume of signups we do get a lot of web traffic, but it's not equally distributed. So just a simple example would be, you know, we need to spruce up our landing page that talks about our enterprise solution, or we need to spruce up, we're just literally working on this, like, we just launched an AI product for us, called click Outbrain. And, yeah, we're gonna send a ton of traffic to it. But we have zero traffic right now. It's like a new thing. There's been no data, we have nothing. So at some point, you just got to make those decisions, make some you know, have some good hypotheses, do a better research to see like how else people are doing it. And my philosophy is like, try to like zag a little bit from the from the Zig don't do what others are doing try to be very, very different. And if you look at our AI page, blink up.com/ai, you'll see a little bit about what we mean, we've kind of broken a lot of the rules of like standard like landing page conventions and whatnot. And it's still converting really well we have something like 10,000 signups to our launch party that's happening on Tuesday, just as an example to like there are there are things that you can, you know, you can marry just different disciplines in marketing to come up with something cool and unique. That doesn't have to be tested in that way. Now, now that we've had that traffic, in a couple of weeks, we will start AP tests. Of course, I want to drive more conversion, of course, I want people to be like raising their hand and saying I want to demo this thing or sign up or whatever, right. So we'll start that and then the next couple of weeks, but not at the outset. That's at least how I've tried to operate. And then there's a whole bunch of stuff in the NOC testing bucket, which you know, you won't know until you observe the data. And frankly, maybe even those things don't need to be observed. For example, maybe I want to advertise on your podcast, how would I actually test that? How would I really know that if I'm if I'm on this podcast, and you know, we do this for three months or six months, that there was like a lift in brand awareness and that people actually Googled us would be very, very difficult to test. I wouldn't like burn cycles on that. That that is more like, who listens like who's the audience? You know, do I believe Phil about like, how many people actually listening and downloading? Okay, I do. Alright, great. This brass, right? That's kind of what it is. Yeah, well, we'll

Philippe Gamache  9:21  
show you screenshots from transistor. Numbers. Yeah, we can talk offline about this for sure. I'd love to like go back to supersites. So like this idea of testing in the early days, you know, obviously even pre rebrand there wasn't probably a ton of traffic, right? Like you were starting from scratch. And I don't know if that was the case for you. But at startups for me the the thing that like the C level folks love is volume of experiments, like number of tests, like how many experiments that we'd run like what did we learn from it? How would How did you like handle that? And maybe that wasn't the case for you, but like how, what advice would you have for listeners that are in those shoes that don't have the volume of traffic to get anywhere close to SAT CIG and feel like there's any validity and like the results of an experiment that had like hundreds of people that went through it, like, how do you deal with that with the C level folks saying like, we need experimentation, that's how companies are growing? Yeah.

Amrita Mathur  10:20  
I haven't had anyone like say we need velocity of testing more like velocity of learning. Like that's at least when my boss met the CEO, at supercedes to say to me, and he said that to me very, very early on, when I was like, freaking out and being like, how are we gonna make our first million? He was just like, don't worry about the money. He was like, just worry about, can you and the team, that small ragtag team of three people we had, like, can you guys like learn really fast, and he was like, that could be qualitative or quantitative. It doesn't have to be like one or the other. So, you know, one of the things we had done was to just throw up a bunch of landing pages and just put a ton of paid media against it to see if we could get to that statistical significance. And test like, essentially, we were testing like value props and seeing like, what's what sticky? Where do people scroll, or where the stop or the click where the Convert blah, blah, blah. But then we also have to learn about a whole bunch of other stuff. Like, if we were to cold call a company, what do we say? How does that go? Is? Is it should be should it be human power? Should it be aI powered? Should it be? You know, do we want them to do a trial with us? Or do we actually just want them to like, come to like something else, like maybe like a webinar or something like what that type of qualitative testing is also helpful and valid, and it allows you to kind of see, which funnels to build, how much to invest in the different parts of marketing, like for us, it turned out that our content marketing engine would not necessarily directly, you know, in an attributed way, like produce real pipeline and that way, like, it wouldn't look like that. But we created this like really big or an almost one, one or two out of every sales call, the prospect would automatically reference like, Oh, my God, I love you guys on LinkedIn, I love your Instagram, it's so funny, or whatever, right? Like they would see they would volunteer that information on their own. And that's like when we weren't skiing. So like two out of 10. We're like just volunteering that. So we knew that some of the things we were doing, were working from a content marketing and social media perspective. And you won't know that often until you actually try and it's out there in the world. And that feedback loop is delayed, sadly, but it is it is what it is. That's that's marketing, I'm pretty sure Coca Cola doesn't know if the billboard campaign they did for the polar bear whatever. Like, I don't think they have that feedback loop like right away, either.

Jon Taylor  12:52  
That's such a smart take on that. And I kind of have a follow up question that you you actually kind of took the words out of my mouth a little bit. But as marketers, I think we've been spoiled by like direct response, analytics, like I do something on the internet. And now there's signups I can attribute that and bring that to somebody and say, Look success. But marketing is full funnel marketing requires brand building and awareness, those billboard type things. What is kind of your approach and your advice to folks who are coming into marketing thinking about how do I build a brand to be, you know, from a startup from zero to a million to 4 million? How do you invest? How do you make those justifications to your team and to the folks in the organization? Like your stakeholders, like a CEO?

Amrita Mathur  13:35  
Yeah, it's, there's so many levers and there's so many variables, I would say like, it really depends on the risk appetite of the company, and the founders. And there's, I've met all sorts of different groups, and everybody's different. I was very lucky and to preside, and like, they were just like, we're gonna go big or go home, he would like it would go bust it is what it is, but we're gonna give it a good shot. Right. So that was liberating. Because now you're like, oh, I can actually go out and do these, like five different things and see what happens. And yeah, might not have a job in six months, or whatever. But you know, I can go do that and figure it out. And it really felt like I had permission to do that. I have friends in companies where their risk appetite just isn't there. And they want to do this like slow burn and preserve their cash flow. And like their runway is only like 18 months or what have you. And it's a whole different ballgame. So there's no playbook. I have to say, the only thing I can advise is that and what's been successful for me is like get like that agreement early on. As to what does what are the leading indicators? Like, what is it good leading indicator look like? You're not going to get to success right away. But what is a great leading indicator? How do you know that you're on the right path, get that agreement with whoever the powers that be? And then you just gotten your weight to that, you know, so that could be? Again, I'll just use Super Centers An example. We knew we wanted to rebrand. And we knew that a good way to test whether the rebrand is working, which didn't just include the name and the logo, but the whole value prop and what we were going after and the personas and whatnot, we knew that a good leading indicator would be, hey, if we spent the exact same, you know, 10,000, or 20,000, we were spending every month, could we actually get more people to sign up for meetings with us? Just that just that maybe we don't close them? Maybe our price is wrong? There's a whole bunch of other things, right? Can I just get that person curious enough to book that meeting with us? That was a great leading indicator that we agreed on. And we showed as soon as we rebranded that that skyrocketed, so we were like, we're on to something great. The persona is right, the value prop is right. All right, now let's kill this puppy. Right? So it's, it's, it's sort of like, you just like, backtrack, the funnel. It's all the work that we normally do, we say, hey, how am I going to make a million bucks in the first four months or whatever, and then you just like, find a spot in the funnel, where you all agree that if we could get to that we would be happy?

Philippe Gamache  16:06  
That's a great point. I like the analogy of backtracking the funnel, because I think folks often focus either right at the top of the funnel, or at the bottom of the funnel when it comes to either branding, or like, are we launching this new campaign or not, but I know that, like, I don't know how different it is with with clickup. Now like, he it's almost a different industry, like you're kind of in martec. Now, I know, marketers are probably like, definitely the persona or like part of the use case for for the product. Yeah,

Amrita Mathur  16:35  
for sure. The it's a very different industry. And I will say that, what I've, what I've learned is that, so it's the first truly horizontal product better. Right? It's like anyone can use click up literally anybody we have people like watch sometimes the signups like and like from our community oriented events, like users will tell us like what they use us for, it'd be like wedding. My wedding on, I met a guy at a tradeshow once, who said that? It was like, Oh, my organization will never buy click up. And he's like, but I love click up. And he showed me these amazing automations he had built so that they had estimated how many days it takes for the milk to run out, for example. And it was an automation that would put it on the grocery list. So him and his wife could see it. Like he has like the most intricate stuff figured out it was so funny, but it was like clickup was their their household, like CEO kind of or CEO, you know, but they had just automated all these like little silly things. So people use it for all sorts of stuff. It's a truly horizontal product. And we have a number of buyer personas and ICPs to go after, which is not a marketer's dream. Actually, I thought it wouldn't because our tam is huge. Our you know, our tam is gigantic. But it's not a marketer's dream. Because you kind of have to market to marketing and, and creative and like engineering and you know, HR and like all of these different people have different problem sets and different value props and, you know, different pains, how manifest in different ways. And it's just like writing five businesses under one. Yeah,

Philippe Gamache  18:06  
no kidding. I definitely echo some of those sentiments. I WordPress, like Similarly, people signing up to build a website for like anything from a photography site to like a wedding site. And I'm curious to hear like how you guys are tackling this and what you can share. But we almost had this kind of like bowling pin strategy, where we looked at who are the most valuable signups from like, an end revenue perspective. Yeah, and we would just like go back at the top of the funnel and focus on that one bowling pin first. So like agencies, and like b2b companies were like a big bowling pin for us. We ended up like pivoting part of the business to WordPress VIP to focus on more enterprise deals. And then we had like, different teams within the company that would almost focus on like, it was the same product, but we're just like, Mellish differently. Yeah, curious what you can share there,

Amrita Mathur  19:00  
ya know, pretty, pretty much the same. We have sort of, you know, four or five very core ICPs two of them are industry specific. And then you know, that what you would guess like we do really well with agencies as well, interestingly, we do really well with marketers, because often, I think marketing tends to be like extremely cross functional across the company. So they have like a greater need for having their shirt together, basically. So that's a great value prop for us. And we've actually also found that a ton of, you know, we we have an internal term that we that we just call EPD, but it's basically that engineering product, design trio that that group together also has similar challenges as marketing, not not as cross marketing, but within the three of them. That had a lot of challenges. So those are the three from the buyer persona perspective that we go after. They're like this. They're they we have a lot of volume of need. but we also have lots of stickiness and the CAC payback and the LTV is amazing on them. So that's where marketing my team focuses a lot.

Philippe Gamache  20:10  
Gotcha. Very cool. I want to ask you about the tech stack from going from Supersite to click up like, on the outside, I thought you know, that tech stack was gonna look very different go into a much bigger company. But there was a ton of growth that Supersite and like I'm curious to hear like the, the the journey from like, starting from almost nothing to like, where you guys left off, like I was looking at the code on the site, and you guys had like Mixpanel HubSpot six cents VWO data dog dream data segment with the Salesforce like a ton of tools. Yeah. And I click up similarly now, census shadow sponsors on the show. Marketo fullstory, Clearbit. Data dog segment, Salesforce Wistia. Yeah, there's lots be a little bit more but yeah, curious, your takes. They're like, what was that surprising to you? Like? How much do you get your hands dirty? And martec these days?

Amrita Mathur  21:03  
Yeah, I actually don't, we have a pretty amazing data team. And we have a separate but like adjacent Mar tech team marketing ops team that actually doesn't live under me. They're like more like a centralized function that support a lot of the other groups. Very cool, though, just to take a step back the way that clique UPS organized, Gross is, there's like the user funnel, if you will, which is the plg motion, like get you get people into the freemium product, doesn't matter what they use us for, then can we retain them for three days, seven days, 14 days, so on right, so that plg user centric machine is related, but separate from the more like top down mid market enterprise marketing machine, which is what I'm running. So it's like data and an ops kind of sits in the middle. And they power both of our funnels, so to speak, there's overlap, but they're not the same. If you, my boss explains it, like in the simplest way he would like you're attracting buyers, and the plg machine attracting users. And those users might be buyers, but they may not all be buyers. And we have some data that shows which ones might be which. But there's there's a whole stack that I was not familiar with, for example, we just implemented something called top line, which is a very classic ML model for qualifying wares usage inside your accounts, they look at it at the account level, where's usage happening inside your accounts? Which usage is on just call it positive usage, like usage, like, you know, like return users, etc, etc. So there's like some scoring mechanism. And then which of those accounts actually have a shit ton of whitespace? So they look at that as well. So like, maybe it's like a 5000 person company, and we only are being used by 500 people, right? So it's like, ooh, whitespace is high. And then it's stack ranks every that we have. So that is super valuable for me because I'm like, okay, expansion, how am I going to expand into WalMart, Coca Cola, whatever, right? And it stack ranks everything. And I map it by GEOS, as much as I can based on the building state, which is kind of messy, because like, people don't live where the headquarters is. But now I know, oh, there's a hub in Dallas for us. Oh, there's a hub in like, Austin, Texas, or there's that there's a hub in Santa Clara or Palo Alto, whatever that looks like, right? Like I can now say, okay, my expansion funnel is in these hotspots. And by the way, these accounts are essentially my ABM program, because of top line is, let me just go after those stat brand accounts. Exactly. And I refresh that, like every month or so it doesn't change much. But every month or so I'm just like, okay, here are the new accounts that we're going to do ABM after so that was a new product for me that I hadn't used in the past. We also have powered our sales reps, the few sales reps that we have with something called pocus, which just allows them to kind of see like, what's happening inside the account what the interesting moments are, and then they can choose to like kind of like in certain playbooks or around that. So yeah, those are two new ones for me. And then of course, there's like the standard like the two and that whole mixed bag of like looking at work, you know, signups and who's progressing to checkouts, who's actually purchasing who's not what's the Fallout, Fallout rate, which ICP is which users are actually progressing, so on and so forth.

Jon Taylor  24:19  
It's pretty fascinating to kind of get a glimpse into how you approach you know, marketing both on the plg side, and the more specifically, that mid market enterprise component, like marketing is such a multidisciplinary industry department, whatever you want to say.

Philippe Gamache  24:36  
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Jon Taylor  26:17  
I believe you report into the chief growth officer. And this is kind of like a representation of like the marriage between product and marketing. How do you think that marketing has evolved, like over the last, I don't know, 10 years at the plg kind of encapsulates us a little bit like marketing teams now work really closely with product but like, talk to us a little bit about how top tier companies like clickup are kind of combining those functions a little bit like the product people and the marketing people sometimes are two halves of the same hole, looking at the same metrics and just using those metrics in slightly different ways to have outcomes for the customers.

Amrita Mathur  26:54  
Yeah, it really depends on your business model. So I think what's what's good about clickup is that they've embraced sort of like, more like classic or traditional marketing and layered on top of the product lead motion, which is very much about user growth and using the product to grow your user base and retain them and keep them happy, they're etc. So a lot of our marketing happens inside the product, again, just like small things, right, like, we launched this AI product. And like so much of my work and the launch strategy was actually inside the product. Like, we have millions of users that we wanted to toggle on AI, you know, and we can't do that, that just because of the way like privacy laws and whatnot, you know, we can't do that for them. So we had to really market to them to toggle that guy on. And then at the account level, also, they have certain permissioning, etc. We didn't want the admins of the account freak out and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So all of that marketing actually happened inside the product, we had like little Pindos, you know, like little banners and modals. And like, certain usage based trigger. So if you did this, then this would turn on stuff like that, right? That's mark, that's not mark, like traditional marketing, lots of people would just call that growth. But that lives, you know, with with the growth team, and this, this trend is been around for like a solid five, six years, like Pendo is like a huge company. Now. So many, so many other companies use them. So So that's, that's pretty, like interesting and new. But I think clickup, similar to some other giants in the space have really like embraced both the plg and traditional marketing, which is which has been interesting. And actually, I don't know if this is an indicator of something of a larger trend or not. But I'm thinking it is I think we're at the cusp of something our chief growth officer just got promoted to see Oh, and now he's also taken on customer success, sales and support. Hmm. So if you think about all of the growth functions of a company, the things that are actually driving dollars, marketing, gross sales support, Nick, all of this is under one roof. The what's what's not under him is finance, you know, robot like field ops, what we call field after Reb Ops is split into two things. product and engineering.

Philippe Gamache  29:23  
Very interesting. Fascinating, huh? So from Chief growth officer to CEO overseeing success support and like products plus growth slash marketing. Yeah,

Amrita Mathur  29:34  
every every revenue function. And I think it's cool that I think the larger trend here is that these are I mean, companies are finally recognizing that these are like extremely intricately interconnected ecosystems, and it just maybe doesn't make sense for them to be pulled apart by hierarchy, or any of that. And flick up, similar to many other companies is on a path to efficiency like We want to IPO we're not going IPO if our stuff is just like, you know, we're spending $1 To make $1. So this packed efficiency and like looking at the LTV and placing those bets, kind of has to be unified sort of thing. So kind of all makes sense for us. But I think it's, I think it's the start of something bigger across the industry.

Philippe Gamache  30:23  
It's really refreshing to hear you talk as the VP of growth focusing on, you know, not just like top of funnel and acquisition, but also the expansion side of the business and net retention and launching new products and activating and putting that in front of existing users. I find that really cool and kind of similar threader, you've written about in a couple of posts, this idea of like the integrated marketing function, and you admittedly kind of hate the term. Yeah,

Amrita Mathur  30:51  
because it's like, of course, integrated. Like, that's not a separate thing. Marketing should.

Philippe Gamache  30:58  
Yeah, but you do you demystified it, like you said, it's basically marketing where teams aren't set up in silos with adjacent priorities, like hashtag one team, one goal. And if you had to give advice to like a massive reorg, or you're starting from scratch, what is the ideal structure look like for growth or marketing to avoid having these sub team silos?

Amrita Mathur  31:21  
Oh, yeah, there's, it really depends on the business model. I think sometimes the swim lanes, like, I'm kind of contradicting myself here a little bit by saying like, it is helpful to have different squads with different swim lanes, I think that is actually helpful, because then people have like, very clear KPIs and focus and you know exactly which part of the playbook is not working. For example, we have an acquisition, we call them acquisition on purpose, because their entire job is to deploy paid media, like it's our basically performance marketing team, but we don't call them performance marketing, because their entire job is to deploy paid media in an efficient way to get that first sign up. Right. So that's like a squad that's, like, hyper focused on that. And they have like a CPL, Target, and a volume target and all of that. So I do, I am a fan of like these clear swim lanes. But I'm also a fan of like, looking at all of those metrics and the entire ecosystem in in one unified way. Like we have a lot of insights from from looking at it like that, which includes things like, oh, this month, you know, we had all of the signups that we know will never convert to paid. So we need to turn that particular dialogue off, we know that because that we've done something like that before, we've attracted that ICP or that persona before, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right. So I think just like looking at it in a unified way, but not necessarily always operating in a super integrated way, is kind of what I'm advocating for. And you need that glue, you need some people and some functions to play that glue between all these teams. And I think that most companies I've worked at, but also observed and where I have friends and peers, they kind of pick one or the other, either they're super integrated, or they're super siloed. Like, there's kind of like, and really what we what everybody needs like this, like perfect in between, which is, which is hard that that takes work. We actually promoted from internally and have a chief of staff now for the while now. So you'll, and he, he's sort of that glue for us so far, which has been really good because he like he did a lot of our planning for this fiscal year around exactly what every squad's metrics are going to be, how are we going to measure them? What is the actual like how there's like a few of us who are VPS, all of us will basically have shared metrics at the at the top end. But then each of us have like those down funnel metrics that we really care about. And he did all of that planning. And it was amazing. So that's an integrated marketing function. We think about it. I

Jon Taylor  34:06  
want to switch gears a little bit, you've written a little bit about your pride and discovery and nurturing and up and coming marketing rockstars I'm sure in your position, you've worked with some fantastic marketers and have worked with them over the over the course of your career. You've already mentioned that the the chiefs of staff being promoted from within so like, this is probably a trend that you're very familiar with. Walk us through your approach for discovering some of these future rockstars. And what are some of the early signs and qualities you look for them? For in people like this and, and stuff our listeners can think about when they're trying to cultivate their own career path?

Amrita Mathur  34:37  
Yeah, that's such a good question. I will admit, this is crude, but I feel like my bar has changed. And I also had this probably my age. I feel like I'm all I also get annoyed a lot more easily. So I think what I used to look for is not anymore What I look for now, so I'm not sure quite exactly how to answer that question. But for me, it boils down to just like a couple of very key things. One of them is just like, Are you like a curious and smart person? I know, everybody says this, but there's ways that it manifests in marketing and growth that is, like very clear and specific. I actually, I actually, like love when people like poke and prod. And kind of like our, you know, just I'll just give it a little illustrate with an example. People post all sorts of slack updates, right? I'm sure your company is too, right. And then people will be like, Oh, my God, I had this when I ran this experiment, blah, blah, blah. And then I watch who was asking questions, you know, outs, particularly if it's outside their domain, and their area of expertise, who's asking questions, what kind of questions are they? And I, I just really admire people that are like, a bit like the, you know, dog with a bone that just won't let something go. There's something weirdly, like morbidly amazing about that, because like, you just, you're just not gonna let it go, you know, and then like, you have that grit, you have that perseverance, or you have that obsession that's developed. That's kind of cool. So I, I love that I can be like that it's annoying to other people. But I think that's an interesting quality. And I hope it doesn't sound like posturing like I'm not advocating for you to posture like that. It's just how some people are. And that's a good quality for a function like growth and marketing, which is truly, really both left brain and right brained, and you need that perfect balance. So that sort of that is like one. And adjacent to that is, I'd say, like people that are like very coachable, and willing to know where they kind of have gaps and perhaps fail and want to do something about it, you may not be able to do something about it right away. I mean, I have a lot of gaps. And I've tried, and there's some gaps that I just can't fill, because I just maybe don't have that capacity of my brain just doesn't work that way or whatever. But I try. And so that's another thing I look for is like coachability, in the form of like, Are you are you aware? And can you? Are you willing to do something about it? Or at least try put your put your first foot forward?

Philippe Gamache  37:22  
Very cool. I love that answer. It actually reminds me to it brings me back to 2019 when I interviewed with conscious and you were the person interviewing me, so you had posted your hiring three or four different roles at Qantas you were just like starting to roll out the team. And I didn't get selected, but you sent me a rejection letter. And you offered to remember that said give me feedback. Like I've got to on the spot. Refresh you a little bit I actually got so yeah, I found that email as I was writing this question. It's all positive, honestly, because like it that you offered feedback that actually became a career turning point for me. You exp so like you you're you were telling me that I didn't get selected and you were like happy to jump on a call and offer you feedback if you get if you're curious about it. And so I took you up on it. And you expanded on some of my shortcomings. In the assignment part of the interview, you said that I didn't tailor it sufficiently to Supersite. I didn't ask enough questions. So it ended up being very crucial for me. And they kind of echoed what you just said in your answer about like not the posturing, but someone asking a bunch of questions, you know, like not just taking something and and kind of doing it. But I've applied this to future interviews, like since I got that feedback from you. And I think that it's like played a role and helped me land jobs at clothes and WordPress. And I took the time to deeply customize take home assignments. And before I started doing anything I asked like all of the questions and pestered them with like a bunch of stuff and was trying to like show where my brain was going with, like some of the questions but yeah, first of all, thank you for the transformative feedback. I hope that it didn't scare you. It's like bringing this back up. But I'm curious to hear like, Why do rejection letters suck so much in our industry? And why did you kind of like have this idea of like, just offering feedback? Do you still do that today? Just curious. Your take there?

Amrita Mathur  39:25  
I think they suck because often it's not the hiring manager doing the rejection, you know, we all have these like systems, right? Like in HR or recruiting has instituted and then they hit a button with the template. That's the standard rejection that's that's really what happens even if it's looks like it comes from hiring manager often it isn't. So that's, that's issue number one. This whole scalability just takes personality out of it. But if I think what I tried to do is like, if someone was like a total died, it's like there's I can't spend any time with them. Like there's just not gonna go anywhere. So like I just cut that loose. is like, I can't do that. But if someone's like, I was like, Oh, they came really close. And like, there's something here. And by the way, I might hire them later for something else, either at this job or somewhere else, or maybe heck them. Yeah, they might hire me. Right, because it's all like incestuous. Right? Like, everyone knows everybody, like we all know, we probably know, like, 500 people in common Phil. So, you know, I, I kind of tried to think about could this could this like, translate into I mean, I never expected for you to say what you said, I didn't expect you to apply that feedback so quickly. But I always just try to think about like, Could this actually be helpful in some ways? And selfishly, both to you, but also to me? So very cool. Yeah. And so I definitely don't do it for everybody. And you can also tell who would be open to it and who's not. Like, I interviewed this one lady, who was like, very, very, very senior at a very fancy pants company. And it was bad like, and you know, she didn't ask for feedback. And I didn't offer feedback. And even if I offered it, she said, Okay, I think she's brings that in her ways. So I was like, What's the point? Yeah,

Jon Taylor  41:08  
one question just throughout the whole interview, something that's really come evident. Talking to and Rita is just like, you mentioned this to like this, marketers are left brained and right brained. And I think as a VP of Marketing, combining these two skill sets when you're managing a team, and getting results, like it's challenging to be a marketer, but most of marketing, I'd argue, is pretty fun. It's pretty enjoyable once you get the hang of what you're doing in marketing, but like, how do you combine all of this? How do you kind of synthesize the right and left the analytics, the results to testing with like, the intuition? The How do I get people to feel a certain way about my brand to take an action? And then how does this manifests in terms of like, your internal communications and working with people, like the stakeholders,

Amrita Mathur  41:53  
part of it's like, knowing kind of like what you don't know, it's like, you don't want it to be the whole Dunning Kruger situation where the, you won't always be able to see around the corners, you won't always know kind of what you don't know. But you kind of roughly have an idea of what you don't like even at click up I was like, kind of don't really know how, you know why customers choose us? Why not Asana or Monday or friggin Smartsheet or notion like there's like so much overlap in our industry? And I don't actually know. And I looked at all our competitive research and oriental and wind laws and, and that the answer was still eluding me. It's like, we don't really know. So it's, it's sort of like, I'm kind of back to that point I was making about that curiosity and that dog with a bone thing, like you just kind of like some things, you just can't let go. And you want to, like, try to dive deep and truly answer it for yourself, not because someone wrote it on a piece of paper, and like, oh, we have our win loss analysis. But like, truly, like why? So I think like, for me, it always starts from there. I will say I rely on people to give me conclusions to things that I don't understand. Like sometimes, like, for example, there's like, people on our data and analytics team, where I'll be like, Okay, thanks for this data. But I actually don't know how to interpret this. And I will be very upfront with them. I was like, I don't know what this is telling me, what are your conclusions from it, and I'll get them to say it to me in English. And then I'll be like, Ah, okay, now I can apply this to my world or to another world. And I also go like a little bit of the extra mile, where if I think there's an application for that information elsewhere in our ecosystem, maybe it's our user growth team, maybe it's our product team, I will pass it on. So like it kind of just do the, and then you not that expect for that to happen in return. But it's just a good way for everyone to know that, hey, this is an interconnected ecosystem, there's stuff that's gonna like pop up and surface, and we should all be keeping each other informed. So I tried to just rely on like smart people to tell me some of the stuff and marry the intuition on just like generally what the trends are and how people purchase. As a consumer myself, of course, I can tap into my own psyche, but also just observing how people around me purchase and how they make those decisions. You know, the, the one thing that is like super clear now is like, the classic funnel, like is totally broken, it's not linear anymore, you know, buyers jump around, they do all sorts of stuff. Most of their research is sometimes anonymous and off site, it's not actually happening on your site, right. So like, all of those dynamics tell you that you don't you'd actually don't know anything. So at the most basic level, at the absolute basic level, my job is to get my brand in front of that perfect consumer over and over and over. So we are top of mind if I just did just that if I just did that in an efficient way. Half of my job is done right and then the rest of it is like gonna follow so I tried to just like demystify stuff for myself and not overthink it.

Philippe Gamache  45:01  
Very cool. Such a powerful answer. There's so many threads on a poll on that. But we're, we're close on time. And I want to hit you with one last question, kind of a two parter question, if you will. So I would love to ask you about your perspective on the Startup Grind. And if you think that that's soften a little bit with the shift to remote to remote work, and this like greater awareness of boundaries and work life balance, I know that you're a mom, now you were pulling 60 plus hour weeks at Supersite. In the early days, do you think that that's something that you still expect out of your team even at a bigger company now? Do you think that there is a path to becoming a VP while also not trying to like burn yourself out and prioritizing boundaries but curious your take there? Because like that's, that's very related to the last question, we ask all of our guests on the show, like your mother, a VP of Marketing, a mastermind group leader at night owl, you said you're a Jedi in training. One question we ask all our guests, like I said, is like how do you remain happy and successful in your career? And how do you find that balance between everything you're working on? Oh, my

Amrita Mathur  46:07  
God, happy half happiness? Yeah. Yeah, no, no easy answer. I, I hope my boss doesn't hear this. But I will say that you, you kind of really have to know like, deep down what is super, super, super important to you. And like, for me, it has to be like, even if it's a grind, I don't mind the grind. But it has to be fun. And for it to be fun. The one key component for me is camaraderie. Like I know, I need that. I know others don't need that. But I know I need that. So that fun piece and the camaraderie piece is super important to me that I had that Supersite, which is why I never felt like a grind. They were also remote from day one before the pandemic. So that really allowed me to be flexible with my day. So for example, they were a lot of our team was in Europe, so they were like six hours ahead of me. So I would like be like in a lot of meetings, then get a lot of stuff done. And then by two o'clock, it would taper off because it was like seven o'clock for them. Right. So when taper off and then I had from two to six to do my own stuff, do my own thinking, of course, we had teammates in Toronto, and sometimes we would go to the co working space and whatever, and meet up and stuff. But it just, I just had a lot of flexibility with how I planned my. And I had the camaraderie and the fun aspect because as we talked about earlier in the episode, there was a lot of leeway around how to run experiments and all of that stuff. I would say that's less possible at a larger company like clickup. Because there's a lot of players, we're all in a very similar timezone. So you actually don't get that reprieve of like the constant notifications and whatnot. And I think the stakes are a lot higher. So interestingly, you would think, Oh, startup lack of resources. So like you're working 60 hour weeks, but the dynamic is actually very different. And the stakes are strangely lower than when you're a big company. And you're trying to go from 200 million to 300 million in one year, right? Like, it's just a different aim. And almost nothing in that system could fall apart. And you certainly don't want to be the person who's making that system fall apart, right? But that just like looks bad, and it hurts your reputation. So yeah, I'd say the, there's no real balance. But I know, in my core what I need to be successful and to be happy. And for that it has to be fun. And I have to have good people around me that I that I can jam with and, and do that. And when I don't have that and I've told my Boston's like, it's not going to work for me. I'm at a point in my career where I can't tolerate that anymore. That is very, very important to me. No, because it is it is a grind. No matter where you go, you know, doesn't matter what state the company or if you are working that many hours and you're giving all your IP your entire being your company, do let it go from 200 to

Philippe Gamache  49:09  
303. Cool, awesome answer. I like that you. You figured that out the fun part, the camaraderie I feel like it took me a bit of time to figure like what were those elements for me too. And I think part of discovering it is just like trying startups and like discovering new things like I have so many friends and and mentees that work in like government in Ottawa Ray and I'm just like trying to get them in tech. Like try a startup like discover new things. You don't know what those elements are until you try different things.

Amrita Mathur  49:42  
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's different for everybody like I got I have people tell me on the team, like money matters a lot to me like money is the number one thing to me. I got me motivated, and there's nothing wrong with that. People want to feel valued and everyone feels valued in a different way. So Yeah, it's just like the answer is like really different for everybody. But I've just given up striving for this like fictitious balance, there is no such thing. There's, there's no such thing. I mean, it's tak like, you know, if you're gonna be in a in a role where you're carrying the bag, like where you're like literally carrying like a revenue number. Like, there's, there's bound to be like very little, quote unquote, balance. If you want that balance, you should be in a different function, go to HR, maybe heck even go to engineering because like, you can code and then go, you know, done. But when you're in marketing, or you're in sales, or you're in growth, like everything you do is incremental, and it adds to that revenue pile.

Philippe Gamache  50:42  
Yeah, definitely agree. Thank you so much for your time. Emerita, this was super fun. I feel like there's like three or four more episodes we could have done on this pulling threads on on your answers, but yeah, really appreciate it. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you.

Philippe Gamache  51:04  
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