6 ms·

Expensify’s CEO on the Tactics That Doubled Its Customer Base

40 points by kareemm 11y ago

pbh101 11y ago
Yes, he certainly is vocal :) http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-hire-net-programmers/ http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-...
- late2part 11y ago
  He misspelled brogrammer?
- huhtenberg 11y ago
  David has a good track of having balls to say what he thinks. http://techcrunch.com/2008/05/02/akamai-fires-engineer-who-spoke-out-against-music-tax/ http://techcrunch.com/2008/05/02/akamai-fires-engineer-who-s...
yeukhon 11y ago
Not sure if writing such a long blog post and updating blog post to comments is best use of time for a CEO of a startup.
- late2part 11y ago
  It got him this publicity, yeah?
- pbreit 11y ago
  It's valuable time spent by a CEO for a variety of reasons. Organizing thoughts. Demonstrating expertise. Getting publicity. Engaging customers and prospects. Eliciting feedback.
  - yeukhon 11y ago
    Fighting his idealogy about hiring on his company blog post? Sure he owns it he founded it, but does not look too good for the business IMO. maybe his clients don't care, but hey I'd rather spend more of my time talking about how my product help or how we achieve our success.
    - pbreit 11y ago
      Looks like you are early in your career so I'd recommend looking at this as a learning moment. Try and forget whatever makes you think this is not valuable.
gk1 11y ago
This started off well, with lessons like paying attention to cost-of-acquisition and encouraging collaboration between product, sales, and marketing teams. Then contradicts itself a few paragraphs later: > Don't wait for the data. Don't pretend what little data you have is more significant than it is... > “...act decisively on those [opportunities] that excite you, and move on,” says Barrett. Then straight up devolves into jibberish: > Clear, direct language helps, but isn’t a silver bullet. Authenticity and relevance are three-dimensional variables, so timing and response workflows are most critical. Yes, clear and direct language, such as "authenticity and relevance are three-dimensional variables..." Plenty of valid points in there, but it's wrapped in so much BS that I'd be ashamed to link to it.
- vessenes 11y ago
  I've known David for five or so years; he's good people. This reads like the writer had a few beers with him and just wrote down whatever David wanted to riff on. Which is pretty much how he rolls. I like it; he'll never be buttoned up. You'll always know what he thinks. Anyway, I'd blame the author and editor here; this is more a marketing piece for both companies than a solid bit of PR from Expensify.
shostack 11y ago
>“At the time, we blindly tried all the stuff everybody says is supposed to work: AdWords, billboards, social, content and more. And we were pretty stressed out about it. We assumed everybody had this dialed in, and we were just idiots. I had some very difficult conversations with our early marketing hires, basically holding them to what I now know is an impossibly objective standard.” As someone who has been doing digital marketing for a long time and is intimately familiar with the pitfalls and "known unknowns" I have to agree pretty strongly with this. Back when last-touch/click attribution was about as good as it got in digital, life was easy, but it was because we were blind to what was really happening from a data standpoint. Now we have fancy attribution tools and OH MY GOD IS IT HORRENDOUSLY FUZZY. Some actions are relatively straightforward to measure performance of from a last-touch standpoint and those are the easy ones to deal with. For anything with a sales process requiring multiple touch points, you're in the fuzzy world of attribution. We're getting a lot better at it, but I'd argue it is the holy grail of marketing questions to know "what value did X contribute to this goal?" which is otherwise known as "I know I'm wasting half my marketing budget, but I don't know which half." I've seen some pretty fancy econometric modelling tools, and Google has done a huge thing for the entire industry by making their core attribution and multi-channel tools available for free, but it is still maddeningly difficult to answer a question such as "what value is our display campaign driving?" or "what is a view-through conversion worth to us?" To get lost in the minutiae is easy given the massive amount of new data available. You then end up with paralysis by analysis. Ultimately there's still some aspects of marketing you need to use your "marketer's gut" in deciding--and this is coming from someone who is a huge data nerd and loves seeing instances where data runs counter to intuition. I'm personally dying to see what Facebook does with Atlas here as they have a very vested interest in proving the value of display given that Facebook and FBX inventory is often found to be more of a "first-touch" awareness driver vs. a last-touch "closer" and thus often gets lumped in as a poor performer for those who aren't looking at attribution, yet are measuring several channels together under a last-touch model. That's why I often tell people that we can look at the data through a variety of lenses, but they are ultimately all directional. So picking an attribution model and consistently making decisions based on it is important. But knowing when to carve out budget to do something that may go against the model is equally important. Case in point, I've dealt with a scenario where I didn't have great cross-device tracking in place, but knew that mobile was an important touch point from an initial engagement standpoint based on some data I had. I couldn't initially prove the link, but I know it is there because I've seen all of the surrounding signs (kind of like how you tell where a black hole is by looking at the signs around where it should be). This is a "known unknown" to some extent, and measuring it precisely, while possible, is not always easy. The resulting lift from pushing mobile was validation, although perhaps not as directly measurable as I would have liked. The best advice I can give to anyone dealing with marketing on this, particularly those with low-volume B2B situations with long sales cycles and many touch points is this: Get comfortable with fuzzy data since if you follow old-school approaches such as "strict last click" you are going to miss out on major opportunities that more savvy and flexible competitors will eat your lunch over.
chatmasta 11y ago
Hint: He's doing it right now
pbreit 11y ago
Too long for me to read but Expensify is an odd animal. If anything, it has been a slow and steady grower so I'm not sure I'd follow too much if you're looking for speedier growth.

40 points by kareemm 11y ago

Yes, he certainly is vocal :) http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-hire-net-programmers/ http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-...

late2part 11y ago
He misspelled brogrammer?
huhtenberg 11y ago
David has a good track of having balls to say what he thinks. http://techcrunch.com/2008/05/02/akamai-fires-engineer-who-spoke-out-against-music-tax/ http://techcrunch.com/2008/05/02/akamai-fires-engineer-who-s...

yeukhon 11y ago

Not sure if writing such a long blog post and updating blog post to comments is best use of time for a CEO of a startup.

late2part 11y ago
It got him this publicity, yeah?
pbreit 11y ago
It's valuable time spent by a CEO for a variety of reasons. Organizing thoughts. Demonstrating expertise. Getting publicity. Engaging customers and prospects. Eliciting feedback.
- yeukhon 11y ago
  Fighting his idealogy about hiring on his company blog post? Sure he owns it he founded it, but does not look too good for the business IMO. maybe his clients don't care, but hey I'd rather spend more of my time talking about how my product help or how we achieve our success.
  - pbreit 11y ago
    Looks like you are early in your career so I'd recommend looking at this as a learning moment. Try and forget whatever makes you think this is not valuable.

gk1 11y ago

This started off well, with lessons like paying attention to cost-of-acquisition and encouraging collaboration between product, sales, and marketing teams. Then contradicts itself a few paragraphs later: > Don't wait for the data. Don't pretend what little data you have is more significant than it is... > “...act decisively on those [opportunities] that excite you, and move on,” says Barrett. Then straight up devolves into jibberish: > Clear, direct language helps, but isn’t a silver bullet. Authenticity and relevance are three-dimensional variables, so timing and response workflows are most critical. Yes, clear and direct language, such as "authenticity and relevance are three-dimensional variables..." Plenty of valid points in there, but it's wrapped in so much BS that I'd be ashamed to link to it.

vessenes 11y ago
I've known David for five or so years; he's good people. This reads like the writer had a few beers with him and just wrote down whatever David wanted to riff on. Which is pretty much how he rolls. I like it; he'll never be buttoned up. You'll always know what he thinks. Anyway, I'd blame the author and editor here; this is more a marketing piece for both companies than a solid bit of PR from Expensify.

shostack 11y ago

>“At the time, we blindly tried all the stuff everybody says is supposed to work: AdWords, billboards, social, content and more. And we were pretty stressed out about it. We assumed everybody had this dialed in, and we were just idiots. I had some very difficult conversations with our early marketing hires, basically holding them to what I now know is an impossibly objective standard.” As someone who has been doing digital marketing for a long time and is intimately familiar with the pitfalls and "known unknowns" I have to agree pretty strongly with this. Back when last-touch/click attribution was about as good as it got in digital, life was easy, but it was because we were blind to what was really happening from a data standpoint. Now we have fancy attribution tools and OH MY GOD IS IT HORRENDOUSLY FUZZY. Some actions are relatively straightforward to measure performance of from a last-touch standpoint and those are the easy ones to deal with. For anything with a sales process requiring multiple touch points, you're in the fuzzy world of attribution. We're getting a lot better at it, but I'd argue it is the holy grail of marketing questions to know "what value did X contribute to this goal?" which is otherwise known as "I know I'm wasting half my marketing budget, but I don't know which half." I've seen some pretty fancy econometric modelling tools, and Google has done a huge thing for the entire industry by making their core attribution and multi-channel tools available for free, but it is still maddeningly difficult to answer a question such as "what value is our display campaign driving?" or "what is a view-through conversion worth to us?" To get lost in the minutiae is easy given the massive amount of new data available. You then end up with paralysis by analysis. Ultimately there's still some aspects of marketing you need to use your "marketer's gut" in deciding--and this is coming from someone who is a huge data nerd and loves seeing instances where data runs counter to intuition. I'm personally dying to see what Facebook does with Atlas here as they have a very vested interest in proving the value of display given that Facebook and FBX inventory is often found to be more of a "first-touch" awareness driver vs. a last-touch "closer" and thus often gets lumped in as a poor performer for those who aren't looking at attribution, yet are measuring several channels together under a last-touch model. That's why I often tell people that we can look at the data through a variety of lenses, but they are ultimately all directional. So picking an attribution model and consistently making decisions based on it is important. But knowing when to carve out budget to do something that may go against the model is equally important. Case in point, I've dealt with a scenario where I didn't have great cross-device tracking in place, but knew that mobile was an important touch point from an initial engagement standpoint based on some data I had. I couldn't initially prove the link, but I know it is there because I've seen all of the surrounding signs (kind of like how you tell where a black hole is by looking at the signs around where it should be). This is a "known unknown" to some extent, and measuring it precisely, while possible, is not always easy. The resulting lift from pushing mobile was validation, although perhaps not as directly measurable as I would have liked. The best advice I can give to anyone dealing with marketing on this, particularly those with low-volume B2B situations with long sales cycles and many touch points is this: Get comfortable with fuzzy data since if you follow old-school approaches such as "strict last click" you are going to miss out on major opportunities that more savvy and flexible competitors will eat your lunch over.

chatmasta 11y ago

Hint: He's doing it right now

pbreit 11y ago

Too long for me to read but Expensify is an odd animal. If anything, it has been a slow and steady grower so I'm not sure I'd follow too much if you're looking for speedier growth.