Wins and Lessons Learned in 2023 as a Growth Consultant
2023 has been a year filled with exciting challenges and significant successes in my growth consulting journey. Here are the most noteworthy.
The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that is changing quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.
- Mark Zuckerberg
As we wind down the year, it's the perfect time for some reflection.
Having worked in startups for ~15 years, I'm no stranger to taking risks. But this yearly ritual of looking back isn't just about paying homage to the goals achieved or basking in our victories. It's more about analyzing and learning from those attempts that didn't hit the mark.
2023 has been a year filled with exciting challenges and significant successes in my growth consulting journey, there stand three major accomplishments.
The strategic pivot that helped XetHub avoid Salesforce and leverage Hubspot for automation and CRM stands at the forefront, marking the importance of adopting the right tools. On top of this, garnering certification in Iterable and expanding my expertise as a growth consultant further delineated this year's victories. These highlights portray the importance of agility and distinctiveness in our ever-changing growth consulting landscape.
Helping XetHub Cut it’s Go-to-Market Time From 6 Months to 3 Months
One of my most significant wins in 2023 was shipping the entire go-to-market (data, tools, processes, content) for XetHub, a seed-stage Machine Learning Ops startup backed by Madrona.
Situation: It was January of 2023, ChatGPT had just launched, and AI and ML were top of mind for developers everywhere. XetHub had just announced their seed round and flagship product a month earlier, and the team felt that to catch the AI wave, they’d need to dramatically accelerate their go-to-market. That’s where me (and my team at Airframe Labs) came-in.
What I wanted to avoid: In my experience, a startup’s customer journey is disjointed because it’s built out by individual contributors (IC) on separate teams. Oftentimes these ICs have expertise within a specific tool, but lack a strategic understanding of how to get the best performance out of the system as a whole. The result: a disjoined customer journey where conversion rates drop at the hand-offs between marketing and sales, and opacity around how upper-funnel efforts translate into sales pipeline. This, in turn, results in high CACs and slower growth.
What we did instead: I worked with XetHub’s co-founders to go to market in a matter of months, and bypass the process of building out a sales and marketing function by leaning on us. We stood-up both a sales-led and then a product-led go-to-market motion.
We drove the tools procurement process, negotiating the terms of agreements. In parallel, we worked with XetHub’s co-founder Rajat Arya to map the sales process and define Lead Statuses and Deal Stages. Finally, we worked XetHub’s head of product Ann Huang to develop content for cold outreach via sales as well as nurture programs for PLG.
“In a matter of months, Prasid and team helped us get from a standing-start to a built-out PLG tools stack with paid ads, automation, and reporting. They helped us ship rapidly while staying lean.” - Rajat Arya, Co-Founder, XetHub
The result: according to our estimates, we cut XetHub’s time-to-market from 6 months to 3 months. Additionally, by leaning on Airframe vs. building-out the team, we cut XetHub’s burn by an estimated $245,000. Most importantly, by taking a first-principles approach to conversion and measurement, we put XetHub on a strong foundation to scale faster than the competition.
Overcoming Impostor Syndrome and Uncovering First Principles with Booksy
Having spent the past 12 years working for startups, I tend to put bigger tech companies on a pedestal. In 2021, when I consulted with Twilio, I was worried I might not be able to add value: it had been 12 years since I’d worked for a company that large (Microsoft). Would they be beyond my ability to help?
Turned out it was imposter syndrome: I crushed it. Because I’d built so many rev ops tools stacks before, I had instant customer empathy and could immediately grasp the use cases for Twilio and Segment. Moreover, given where I was sitting within product marketing, I ended up being one of the few folks who could break-through data blockers because I was already a power-user of Salesforce reporting and Looker. A year later Twilio offered me a full-time job (I declined).
Despite that win, I felt imposter syndrome again in 2023 when I started working with Booksy. I hadn’t worked on a mobile app in 10 years since Scribd. And like Twilio, Booksy was pretty big already, serving tens of millions of users. Would they have it all figured out?
Turned out that on the data and tools side, they were in very strong shape. Their lifecycle marketing was also already quite sophisticated.
What I learned, though, is that my first-principles approach to finding growth opportunities could still be valuable. Within two quarters we were able to ship 2 conversion experiments that were big winners - like double-digit growth! And I’m hoping by the end of one more quarter, we’ll have unlocked and scaled an entirely new acquisition channel.
I honestly didn’t see any of this until I was talking to the co-founder of XetHub. He was really the one who pointed out that my “first principles” is what had really set my guidance apart for his business.
Expanding Our RevOps Consulting Practice: Airframe Becomes an Iterable-Certified and Hubspot-Certified Partner
As I’d reflected on the growth of consulting business, I realized we were hitting a ceiling because so much of what I do can’t be productized. Most of our consulting work is completely bespoke to the startup, the stage they’re at, and the specific situation.
The one exception was building out a Revenue Tools stack: this was one of the few places where I was seeing similar work across the build-outs for MIRROR, Pencil, XetHub, InterviewKickstart, Coding Dojo, and Consolidate Health. And so we decided to start focusing on going deep here as a way to scale the consulting business.
The first step: becoming a certified partner with Hubspot and Iterable so they can start referring business to us, and us to them.
Understanding Product-Market Fit: Lessons from a Failed Course on Growth Marketing
Alongside these victories, however, came some humbling moments.
One crucial lesson was the importance of product-market fit when I tried (and failed) to launch a course on Growth Marketing.
I had so much experience doing growth marketing for online course providers (Bloc.io, Codecademy, Coding Dojo, Dataquest, and Interview Kickstart). So I felt I could apply everything I’d learned, and launch a “bootcamp” in growth marketing.
The course, encapsulating bi-weekly small-group sessions over ten weeks, had a price tag of $2K. My thinking was that if there’s a huge 20K students/year market for intensive online developer bootcamps that cost over $15K, surely there’d be a much larger market for an intensive online growth marketing bootcamp that was just $2K.
Then reality kicked my ass. After standing-up the course funnel and spending $5K on ads, the data showed that although our cost per lead was in-line with bootcamps, our conversion rates were dramatically lower.
We managed to get just 3 enrollments, and ultimately I decided to cancel the cohort and refund the students.
My conclusion: Growth Marketing may still be too-niche, and the $2K / 10 week form-factor is too-new. Thus, even with a best-in-class GTM motion, we couldn’t overcome a lack of product-market fit.
Connecting with my Audience: Embracing Beginner-Friendly Content
Furthermore, I discovered the value of focusing on more beginner-friendly ideas.
As someone deeply immersed in growth marketing, I often felt compelled to share cutting-edge insights and advanced strategies.
The result: despite getting increasingly active on LinkedIn, my reach wasn’t growing. Ironically, the best-performing posts of the year had to do with more pedestrian topics like “How I Implemented Atomic Habits.”
That’s when I realized that most folks I’m trying to help are likely beginners. Trying to impress folks with advanced strategies was just inaccessible to them.
This year I plan to shift my focus to more beginner-friendly insights that meet them where they are.
Looking Ahead to 2024: Goals and Aspirations
Looking ahead to 2024, I’m excited to help my startup customers win. 2023 was a rough year: budgets got tighter, sales cycles got longer, and conversion rates dropped. To compensate, we kept our top of funnel spend tight. Instead, we invested in a lot of block-and-tackle conversion optimization strategies like landing page testing, smart appointment booking, and omni-channel nurture programs. The result, I hope, is that the growth engines we’ve built convert higher than the competition. Next year, as we scale-up top of funnel, I hope those investments will materialize as accelerated top-line growth.
I am also enthusiastic about integrating AI tools into our startups’ revenue stacks.
2023 felt like a lot of buzz around AI, but outside of content production, I didn’t see many tangible ways AI was driving big performance gains anywhere in the funnel.
In 2024, we’ll start to see AI use cases emerge that are having a substantive impact on funnel metrics. Three specific ideas I plan to test with the startups we work with:
AI-powered sales personalization - using AI to research prospects so that every sales touch feels bespoke, but can be done at-scale
AI-powered synthetic conversions being passed to ad platforms as an optimization-signal
Had the same experience with beginner friendly content. I feel it!