Adam Grenier
Former Head of Growth Marketing and Innovation at Uber, former VP of Marketing at MasterClass, growth advisor and investor
Where to hear and read about Adam Grenier1 episode or test
Adam Grenier is a growth marketer who built Uber's growth marketing team, ran marketing at MasterClass, and now advises founders and invests. The thing most worth learning from him is to test new channels only when they fit your customers, the channel's stage and your company's readiness, with small, time-boxed bets.
I wouldn't let anything bleed past a quarter
When to invest in new acquisition channels | Adam Grenier (Uber, MasterClass)
Adam Grenier: the story and the lessons
1Adam Grenier's path from ads to advising
Grenier moved from agency advertising to startup growth to advising. He calls ads phase one, startup and growth phase two, and advising phase three. He started in agency advertising, then spent four years at Uber building its growth marketing infrastructure and team, as head of growth marketing and innovation.
He later led product and marketing at Lambda School and marketing at MasterClass. He says he has no favorite phase and embraces "what gets thrown at me".
He built his range by working across many companies. Grenier says he loves working closely with entrepreneurs on the odd problems he has seen over 20 years. His strength is changing context and connecting the dots for people.
His starting point was mobile, with Sun Microsystems as his first client. At Lambda School he ran PR without being a PR person.
He now mixes advising, investing and coaching, leaning toward investing. He has invested for six or seven years and recently joined Andreessen's scout funds. He would still take the right full-time role if it appeared.
He calls the hybrid "me as a service", a phrase he credits to Reforge. He expects to end up with some kind of anchor, because he thrives with one.
2Grenier's three checks before testing a new acquisition channel
Grenier checks that the channel's strengths match customer needs and goals. Before testing any hot channel, he looks for overlap between what customers need, what the company wants and what the channel does well. Clubhouse is a green light for Spotify because audio and music discovery overlap, while photo-driven Paparazzi is a yellow light even if it became huge.
Most teams skip this and only ask whether a channel is hot. B2B companies are the worst offenders. He doesn't need a Notion Clubhouse channel this week.
He studies a channel's stage and how it makes money. A very early channel may be a once-in-a-lifetime chance, but it will change a lot. Facebook pulled the notification feature that gave Zynga and Zoosk their early growth.
Spending two quarters on Clubhouse means accepting it may be a one-off. A channel that early will change a lot over the next two years.
He used a channel's monetization goals to win partnership leverage. At Hotel Tonight, Grenier got into Facebook's mobile ads alpha by offering five years of mobile install ad buying experience and a non-game case study. Facebook needed travel and leisure advertisers.
If your business supports the channel's monetization strategy, you can ask for custom work and your solution is more likely to last.
He wants a solid base on Google and Facebook before going first. Few companies should put energy into a brand new channel before finding volume on the channels everyone uses. A true first mover faces poor tracking, no programmatic buying, ads beside offensive content and refunds that will not happen.
You also need someone who can run the test without distracting from everything else. If the basic channels give you nothing, a new channel should not get your first energy.
3How Grenier sizes and time-boxes channel tests
Grenier caps any new channel test at one quarter. A month or less of fishing gives signal but not statistical significance. A new channel has no playbook, so it needs a few cycles. If it is not directionally improving or interesting after a quarter, he puts it back on ice.
Quote: "I wouldn't let anything bleed past a quarter".
He sets the time box by what the test costs. A video test costing three weeks and $20,000 earns more time than text ads in podcast listings, which one person can set up at midnight.
He repeats a warning attributed to Yuri: it is often better not to try than to test badly and learn the wrong lesson.
He staffs tests minimally and scales only when magic appears. A small team should put about half of one person on a new channel. A 20-person team with a killer fit might dedicate three people.
If the half person sees some magic, give it a sprint or two as a whole team. His line: "keeping it minimum at first is my typical recommendation".
He defines the success signal before the test starts. On Clubhouse there are no clicks, so he would check whether each room grows by about 10 people over the last one. On TikTok he would judge clicks and conversions like any other channel.
If rooms slip from 20 people to 15, the problem is execution, the channel or reach. He looks for momentum, not statistical significance, and treats each test as a cost against the backlog.
4Grenier's read on which channels are worth it now
Grenier favors channels that matured over brand new ones. His successes came from existing channels that finally scaled, like podcasts, or new offerings on established platforms, like Facebook mobile install ads. Brand new channels rarely work or are worth the early effort.
The first 18 months of Facebook mobile installs felt emerging, with weekly product changes and broken tracking. When new channels do work, they change the game.
He treats podcast ads like radio, not direct response. What works is the right program, a personal feel and endless repetition. Podcasts will not match Google and Facebook volumes.
B2B suits them best, because each customer is worth enough that scale matters less.
He finds influencer marketing the most intriguing channel. It offers hyper-granular targeting, such as finding five hardcore fans of a niche, and feels like early Facebook. It is tedious, manual relationship management, so tooling is an opportunity.
MasterClass onboarded Grin, one of about half a dozen all-in-one tools covering discovery, CRM, measurement and payments. Grenier could not recall why Grin won over rivals that looked about equally good.
He sees OTT as trackable TV with long-form storytelling. OTT offers broad reach, much of it unskippable when bought, and is far more trackable than traditional TV. Its tools are much better than four years ago.
It fits MasterClass, which has lots of video content. He compares VR today to mobile before the iPhone 3: interesting only if you have a VR app.
5Grenier on product market fit when the market shifts
Grenier assumes product market fit is gone when the market shifts. You had fit in a different market, so he starts from the assumption that you no longer have it. You may only need to adjust a couple of things.
Launching a new channel is the wrong fix, because "your entire customer base changed, not just the next 10 percent of customers that you're looking for."
He flags companies whose TAM and product market fit use different definitions. Early adopters are often drastically different from the broad audience. As an investor, he treats a gap between the market size claimed and the market where fit was proven as the biggest red flag.
He suggests mapping what you must see in early adopters to trust fit beyond them, and starting with Crossing the Chasm. He thinks Clubhouse may have widened its audience sooner than it should have, while granting that is hard to judge in hindsight.
6How Grenier thinks about the growth CMO and marketing hires
Grenier says a growth CMO runs marketing like product development. A growth CMO uses data on brand and retention, iterates on everything from landing pages to the logo, and follows each brand investment with the next one. Traditional CMOs treat brand as campaigns and learnings.
He saw world-class CMOs join several product-led companies and not last, because their operating style did not fit. A rigid 24-month plan can get you "eaten alive".
He tells marketing leaders to learn how product teams work. They do not need to become PMs. Sprints and agile apply to marketing work, even a big event. He points to the book Hacking Marketing, Reforge classes and Maven courses.
The payoff is a different way of running the team and becoming far better partners to product.
He screens startup marketing hires for chaos tolerance and hands-on work. At Series C or below, he looks for comfort with chaos and willingness to do work like writing an email or digging into Facebook data. He then maps the candidate's T-shaped career to see what they must hire around.
He says he is past the point where he should be in Facebook, but goes in when needed. He aims to reach the valley of despair of the Dunning-Kruger effect fast, so he knows how bad he is.
He uses improv's "yes, and" to work across teams. At Uber, central teams and city teams often scoped the same problem differently. Accepting that both views can be true built rapport and better solutions.
He rarely says it out loud in meetings. It works as a stance, and he suggests managers ask their teams to call them out with "Adam, yes and this please".
7What Grenier learned about burnout and depression
Therapy showed Grenier that overwork was solving a different problem. At Uber he was exhausted and down and assumed he worked too hard. As the youngest child, he longed for recognition, and work gave him that.
He stopped judging himself for working hard and chose to work smarter, with people who respect the work. Real burnout was also there: constant travel, politics and a team of 150 he barely knew. He left to work on flying cars.
He tells exhaustion from depression by motivation outside work. When exhausted, he still enjoys an improv class. When depressed, he cancels it or leaves right away. A feeling that lasts three weeks is worth dissecting with his therapist.
Five or six years ago only his therapist and wife knew. Now five or six friends are open with each other, which helps him find the stressor, such as his father's ALS, three kids or the market crash.
He sees falling adaptability as the clearest sign of burnout. In growth, marketing and product, the response shifts from "let's give it a shot" to "why are we wasting our time". Burned-out people look for ways to make the job easier.
Exhausted people are re-motivated by new opportunities, which is the opposite pattern.
When to invest in new acquisition channels | Adam Grenier (Uber, MasterClass)
Adam Grenier gives a three-part framework for deciding whether to invest in an emerging acquisition channel, explains what a growth CMO does differently from a traditional CMO, and shares how to tell exhaustion from depression. It is worth hearing for concrete rules on team size and time limits for channel tests, and for his advice to restart from zero on product market fit when the market shifts.
Grenier moved from agency advertising to startup growth to advising. He calls ads phase one, startup and growth phase two, and advising phase three. He started in agency advertising, then spent four years at Uber building its growth marketing infrastructure and team, as head of growth marketing and innovation.
He later led product and marketing at Lambda School and marketing at MasterClass. He says he has no favorite phase and embraces "what gets thrown at me".
He built his range by working across many companies. Grenier says he loves working closely with entrepreneurs on the odd problems he has seen over 20 years. His strength is changing context and connecting the dots for people.
His starting point was mobile, with Sun Microsystems as his first client. At Lambda School he ran PR without being a PR person.
He now mixes advising, investing and coaching, leaning toward investing. He has invested for six or seven years and recently joined Andreessen's scout funds. He would still take the right full-time role if it appeared.
He calls the hybrid "me as a service", a phrase he credits to Reforge. He expects to end up with some kind of anchor, because he thrives with one.
Grenier checks that the channel's strengths match customer needs and goals. Before testing any hot channel, he looks for overlap between what customers need, what the company wants and what the channel does well. Clubhouse is a green light for Spotify because audio and music discovery overlap, while photo-driven Paparazzi is a yellow light even if it became huge.
Most teams skip this and only ask whether a channel is hot. B2B companies are the worst offenders. He doesn't need a Notion Clubhouse channel this week.
He studies a channel's stage and how it makes money. A very early channel may be a once-in-a-lifetime chance, but it will change a lot. Facebook pulled the notification feature that gave Zynga and Zoosk their early growth.
Spending two quarters on Clubhouse means accepting it may be a one-off. A channel that early will change a lot over the next two years.
He used a channel's monetization goals to win partnership leverage. At Hotel Tonight, Grenier got into Facebook's mobile ads alpha by offering five years of mobile install ad buying experience and a non-game case study. Facebook needed travel and leisure advertisers.
If your business supports the channel's monetization strategy, you can ask for custom work and your solution is more likely to last.
He wants a solid base on Google and Facebook before going first. Few companies should put energy into a brand new channel before finding volume on the channels everyone uses. A true first mover faces poor tracking, no programmatic buying, ads beside offensive content and refunds that will not happen.
You also need someone who can run the test without distracting from everything else. If the basic channels give you nothing, a new channel should not get your first energy.
Grenier caps any new channel test at one quarter. A month or less of fishing gives signal but not statistical significance. A new channel has no playbook, so it needs a few cycles. If it is not directionally improving or interesting after a quarter, he puts it back on ice.
Quote: "I wouldn't let anything bleed past a quarter".
He sets the time box by what the test costs. A video test costing three weeks and $20,000 earns more time than text ads in podcast listings, which one person can set up at midnight.
He repeats a warning attributed to Yuri: it is often better not to try than to test badly and learn the wrong lesson.
He staffs tests minimally and scales only when magic appears. A small team should put about half of one person on a new channel. A 20-person team with a killer fit might dedicate three people.
If the half person sees some magic, give it a sprint or two as a whole team. His line: "keeping it minimum at first is my typical recommendation".
He defines the success signal before the test starts. On Clubhouse there are no clicks, so he would check whether each room grows by about 10 people over the last one. On TikTok he would judge clicks and conversions like any other channel.
If rooms slip from 20 people to 15, the problem is execution, the channel or reach. He looks for momentum, not statistical significance, and treats each test as a cost against the backlog.
Grenier favors channels that matured over brand new ones. His successes came from existing channels that finally scaled, like podcasts, or new offerings on established platforms, like Facebook mobile install ads. Brand new channels rarely work or are worth the early effort.
The first 18 months of Facebook mobile installs felt emerging, with weekly product changes and broken tracking. When new channels do work, they change the game.
He treats podcast ads like radio, not direct response. What works is the right program, a personal feel and endless repetition. Podcasts will not match Google and Facebook volumes.
B2B suits them best, because each customer is worth enough that scale matters less.
He finds influencer marketing the most intriguing channel. It offers hyper-granular targeting, such as finding five hardcore fans of a niche, and feels like early Facebook. It is tedious, manual relationship management, so tooling is an opportunity.
MasterClass onboarded Grin, one of about half a dozen all-in-one tools covering discovery, CRM, measurement and payments. Grenier could not recall why Grin won over rivals that looked about equally good.
He sees OTT as trackable TV with long-form storytelling. OTT offers broad reach, much of it unskippable when bought, and is far more trackable than traditional TV. Its tools are much better than four years ago.
It fits MasterClass, which has lots of video content. He compares VR today to mobile before the iPhone 3: interesting only if you have a VR app.
Grenier assumes product market fit is gone when the market shifts. You had fit in a different market, so he starts from the assumption that you no longer have it. You may only need to adjust a couple of things.
Launching a new channel is the wrong fix, because "your entire customer base changed, not just the next 10 percent of customers that you're looking for."
He flags companies whose TAM and product market fit use different definitions. Early adopters are often drastically different from the broad audience. As an investor, he treats a gap between the market size claimed and the market where fit was proven as the biggest red flag.
He suggests mapping what you must see in early adopters to trust fit beyond them, and starting with Crossing the Chasm. He thinks Clubhouse may have widened its audience sooner than it should have, while granting that is hard to judge in hindsight.
Grenier says a growth CMO runs marketing like product development. A growth CMO uses data on brand and retention, iterates on everything from landing pages to the logo, and follows each brand investment with the next one. Traditional CMOs treat brand as campaigns and learnings.
He saw world-class CMOs join several product-led companies and not last, because their operating style did not fit. A rigid 24-month plan can get you "eaten alive".
He tells marketing leaders to learn how product teams work. They do not need to become PMs. Sprints and agile apply to marketing work, even a big event. He points to the book Hacking Marketing, Reforge classes and Maven courses.
The payoff is a different way of running the team and becoming far better partners to product.
He screens startup marketing hires for chaos tolerance and hands-on work. At Series C or below, he looks for comfort with chaos and willingness to do work like writing an email or digging into Facebook data. He then maps the candidate's T-shaped career to see what they must hire around.
He says he is past the point where he should be in Facebook, but goes in when needed. He aims to reach the valley of despair of the Dunning-Kruger effect fast, so he knows how bad he is.
He uses improv's "yes, and" to work across teams. At Uber, central teams and city teams often scoped the same problem differently. Accepting that both views can be true built rapport and better solutions.
He rarely says it out loud in meetings. It works as a stance, and he suggests managers ask their teams to call them out with "Adam, yes and this please".
Therapy showed Grenier that overwork was solving a different problem. At Uber he was exhausted and down and assumed he worked too hard. As the youngest child, he longed for recognition, and work gave him that.
He stopped judging himself for working hard and chose to work smarter, with people who respect the work. Real burnout was also there: constant travel, politics and a team of 150 he barely knew. He left to work on flying cars.
He tells exhaustion from depression by motivation outside work. When exhausted, he still enjoys an improv class. When depressed, he cancels it or leaves right away. A feeling that lasts three weeks is worth dissecting with his therapist.
Five or six years ago only his therapist and wife knew. Now five or six friends are open with each other, which helps him find the stressor, such as his father's ALS, three kids or the market crash.
He sees falling adaptability as the clearest sign of burnout. In growth, marketing and product, the response shifts from "let's give it a shot" to "why are we wasting our time". Burned-out people look for ways to make the job easier.
Exhausted people are re-motivated by new opportunities, which is the opposite pattern.
Uber