How Calm Added 1.2M Subscribers with Creative Marketing Tactics

The user quality based on advertisement was insane. I mean, we would have certain ads that would only convert at like 5% from a trial to purchase and then like some ads that converted all the way up to 60 or 70%. We were the first on the creative to get sophisticated on social listening. And when we started integrating this stuff that was like directly from socials, I mean, I've never seen more explosive growth in user acquisition. When you would pull up Instagram or Snapchat and you would look at just the verality metrics, the stuff was going insane in view and reach. It kind of mapped on to for some reason the psychoraph of column users perfectly. Welcome to Subversive, a podcast dedicated to sharing stories from the best consumer subscription apps in the world. We'll bring you lessons for how to grow your consumer subscription business, including insights and inflection points that led

to exponential growth from leaders at category defining companies and innovative startups. Let's get into the show. My guest today is Nick Canandler, who served as director of growth marketing at Calm during their hyperrowth period from 2019 to 2022 and who now leads his own performance marketing agency called Tensale. In this episode, I talked to Nick about how sleep stories led to Calm's breakout success, about the specific performance marketing strategies that Colm used to leaprog Headspace as the world's number one meditation app, and about how Nick expects AI to revolutionize the world of online user acquisition over the next few years. All right, welcome Nick to the Subversive podcast. I'm really excited to have you on today both because I'm a longtime admirer of Calm uh where you worked for about four years, but also because I've learned a lot from you as a fellow growth adviser and uh specifically performance

marketing specialist. So, let's jump

straight into it and love to just start with a little bit on your background and how you found your way to column in 2019. My first career was bond trading, which is super different. Uh, I worked over overnights in like a super old school Chicago prop shop. Um, doing like 16-hour days just trading treasury spreads. Um, and super interesting career really that like solo opportunity I think I really resonated with but not super fulfilling. So eventually started looking at other things. um a um another trader got me into user acquisition. He had switched careers and he brought me along. Um and so I did gaming for a year. Um and sort of one of the things that got me interested in changing what I was doing was my mindfulness practice.

Um which I think over time shifted my priorities of what I found to be important in life. Um, and I just sort of started setting more intentions around making an impact and and I I don't know, it's kind of crazy how things shook out in retrospect, but that that I think is one of the things that kind of helped bring me to calm eventually. >> Yeah. So, we're going to spend most of the episode today talking about calm, but before we go there, you mentioned that you had this brief stint as a bond trader, and I hear this a lot.

Performance marketers who started their careers in finance. Uh for those who haven't heard about this, I guess I'd love to hear a little bit more on your perspective of why that happens, like what are the similarities between bond trading and performance marketing? >> Well, I think for anyone who does like actual prop trading or like professional trading, you're usually dealing with arbitrage and so you're trying to capture some sort of like theoretical value on different financial instruments and that is one of the most technically sophisticated industries of all time.

you're dealing with like literally rocket scientists. People are dealing with these spreads that are just razor sharp and razor thin. And but it wasn't always like that. It actually used to be pretty easy. Like if you were if you could do some basic math, you would become a millionaire. And so when I like learning in that environment where you're dealing with these insanely razor thin margins and then going to performance marketing, it felt like honestly it felt it was a breath of fresh air. it kind of felt like just extremely easy. So, um I mean things are getting much more competitive now, but especially when I was getting started, it it was kind of I think similar to the old school trading days. Yeah. Well, it's sort of the nature of arbitrage opportunities in general, right? Is that they generally get found and exploited.

And maybe that's a good segue into your early days at Col because I know you've talked about what a special time that was for a variety of reasons, but I don't want to put words into your mouth.

So you you joined Colum in January 2019. Talk me through what the company looked like. How many people were at Column when you joined and what did your role look like as one of the early performance marketers there? >> The team was pretty established at that point. There was about 50 of us um overall in the column or they had done quite a bit of growth. The performance marketing team was pretty small. I think it we were basically three. I was brought in uh I was early in my career there as as manager. Um at that time calm was sort of at the nexus of a lot of the massive cultural headwinds. So with meditate like especially mindfulness was just having kind of appeared to be a one-size solution for all the mental health issues that people were experiencing around technology. Um and Calm also was sort of I mean they had an amazing team, amazing CEO uh who had a great sense for that sort of thing. But uh also great like growth

leadership uh Dun Wayne who had worked I believe on Words with Friends and like you know was one of the big growth minds there. she brought those growth mechanics to calm uh and like calm was one of the first subscription apps to really dial in monetization um mechanics and conversion mechanics. So uh you have massive cultural headwinds like great just like marketing DNA as a company and nobody else competing in performance marketing. So it was it was wide open. So sort of the contrast to what you described in bond trading where you know the game had already become so sophisticated that these margins were razor thin. You come to Calm early 2019 and it's still sort of a blue ocean opportunity both because meditation was coming up as this new category for digital app experiences and Headspace and Calm were you know in a in a dog fight but there weren't that many other meditation apps yet and the

performance marketing best practices were still being established and so I imagine that must have been really fun for you. Before we get too deep into some of the specific performance marketing tactics you and your team

implemented, I'd love to talk a little bit about sleep and sleep stories because as an outsider and I don't know the calm story that well, but the you know the story you're often told is Headspace was the first mover into meditation. Calm was a fast follower, not far behind Headspace, but at least a year or two behind. But there was sort of this inflection point where Col figured out how important sleep was and then sleep stories catapulted it past Headspace as the number one player in in the market. Tell me a little bit more about why sleep was so important for Calm and and and how specifically on the marketing side, Calm figured out how to take some of the core product innovation they were doing around sleep and distribute it to customers who needed it. I think like Calm's venture into sleep is reflective of a number of things that I think can generalize well for like any company out there which is just extremely

experimental like willingness to innovate and test new markets and expand the category. Um, uh, I think how column activated Sleep Stories was like really partnership focused, talent focused, like the intention of a lot of that stuff was to create a PR buzz, you know, if it was Matthew McConn or or whatever these sort eventually we landed on these sort of like there's obviously Harry Styles, but then there's these like belist celebrities like Silly Murphy or like no offense, he's amazing, but uh, you know, these >> maybe maybe A-list since Oppenheimer, but be list at that Yeah, exactly. But like these like cult following folks um that were just like sort of strange and weird. And so when we would do these content offerings, one, not only did they they expand our TAM, but they allowed us to like create a PR wave on every single on every single release. Uh, and I think there's also a lot to learn there about like

looking to your product to figure out where you can expand. Like leaning into sleep stories was not just like a random idea. It's something that really came from an analyzing data and understanding usage patterns and knowing that people really needed support at that time. So that was a very like calm uh thing through and through to to go down that route. I'll throw something out that may be provocative and feel free to completely disagree with this, but in some ways as I think about meditation and mindfulness broadly defined versus sleep meditation and mindfulness, you talked yourself about how you you were developing your own mindfulness practice, which is part of what led you from finance into your job at Calm. And I'm somebody who's practiced meditation for for large parts of my life. like it's it can be very additive but for people who don't yet fully understand its value it can feel

like a vitamin until you really understand the purpose behind it whereas sleep is something everyone can agree if you are not sleeping at night there are few things in life that matter more and so it is the definition of a painkiller if you're not sleeping to what extent do you think that played a role in it striking such a nerve with the general public when when column sort of stumbled onto that as being a key part of the market opportunity >> yeah and that's how Like for instance, Michael Actton Smith, the one of the co-CEOs of Column, that's one of the things he'd really talked about and I think why he was so bullish and pushing the company in that direction was that specifically it's like you when when you're scrolling on your phone at 2 in the morning and you can't sleep like that is like a perfect activation moment to be hit with that marketing. Um, and it fulfills that that need immediately.

But you know both of those things also have very different like retention patterns and stuff. So it's you know it's interesting how like different features and different use cases also flow through to like different user quality and stuff of that nature which we see all the time and on the messaging like paid paid media.

>> Let's use that as an opportunity to get more tactical. So you talked about how okay you got insomnia or you're just having a bad night of sleep. You're up at two in the morning. you're doom scrolling on Facebook or Instagram and you you come across an ad for Calm. What were some of the channels that you all experimented with early on with Sleep Stories? And then I mean you joined a couple years after the initial launch of Sleep Stories and so I don't know to what extent you were working on Sleep Stories specifically or not, but what were some of the channels you experimented with and and where did you find that you were able to have the most impact? Yeah, we experiment. I mean, we were pretty big on Meta uh at the time.

Every you know, Facebook um and Google as the big ones and those were really at the time the only game in town. I mean, we tried pretty much every single channel you possibly can try though. You stuff like Tabula and like the Outbrain, you know, trying uh the all the various Roar video carriers, a lot of influencer. There's this channel Jet Fuel at the time. I mean literally on TV TV TV was huge and you know cuz especially in sleep it's like buy we would buy remnant inventory on TV at like 2:00 in the morning and that was sort of like the perfect >> the perfect time as well. Um so yeah I mean I don't think there wasn't a channel that we weren't experimenting in. Uh, but nothing could can really compete with the size and scale of of of paid social, which was kind of my where I was really focused. Got it. Okay. So,

it was paid social was where you made most of your hay and I imagine much of that was on meta and much of it probably eventually on Instagram. What were some of the specific ad formats or messaging you tried and and how did you kind of iterate your way to greatness? Yeah, that's the interesting thing about I guess when I joined and my experience or maybe what my impact was at Colm is I joined the team and we were spending like over $100,000 a day on Meta, which at that time was like I don't think there was too many advertisers doing that that weren't like major brands. Um, and we only were making like five creatives a month or something like five 10 creatives a month. And I come from gaming where where I had seen like what I kind of understood at that point how big of a deal the creative iteration was. Being responsible for this channel, I knew if I didn't fix it, like it was going to be my, you know, it was going

to be a bad time. Um, and so that was sort of where I went to work. Um, and I had the luck of getting some guidance from someone who really understood the iterative iterative approach. Matt Heryuchi who is my manager at that time and being resourced by calm like that's one of the things they were great at is if they saw something working they just threw stuff behind you. So you know next thing I know I we were getting some initial wins and it just kind of snowballed. Um, but the the thing that worked is we were just extremely analytical in how we broke down the messaging and like iterated. And then probably the inflection point there on the creative is uh we worked with tube science who is a great another great performance agency out there and they they had like messaging and formats really dialed in. And so we were able to learn a lot from that and uh and yeah through the partnership with them um kind of

integrate that into our own team which you know I I definitely am experiencing the karma of that now when I have my own agency of like going and working with people and showing them the way and then I create my own competitors but yeah well it's the nature of any great master I guess as you teach your apprentices and then eventually they become their own masters. So, you talked about oddly satisfying video visual hooks, right?

I've I've I've heard you write about that on LinkedIn or or or otherwise online. Like, what did that look like at Calm? Like, what were some of to the extent you could describe it? And in some cases, I guess you just have to see this to understand what it means, but how would you describe some of these hooks that worked and why do you think they work so well? I think at the the internet at the time, probably the largest cultural trend was oddly satisfying. So, we're talking about like kinetic sand, cutting kinetic sand or like Yeah. Um like power washing or like even if it's just like ASM ASMR more generally. Uh there was a lot of stuff specifically around 3D oddly satisfying.

So these sort of like >> um what what's that called? The machines that that like you know do a million different things to like kick a ball at the end or whatever that >> Oh, the Rube Goldberg contraptions. >> Rub Gold. Yeah, like Rub Goldberg 3D oddly satisfying stuff. And this was when you would pull up Instagram or Snapchat and you would look at just the verality metrics like this. This stuff was going insane in view and reach. It kind of mapped on to for some reason the psychoraph of column users perfectly.

And so by reverse engineering some of those social dynamics into our advertisements like we hit almost in the same way Colum was like first to monetization. We were the first on the creative to get sophisticated on social listening and when we started integrating this stuff that was like directly from socials. I mean, I've never seen more explosive growth in user acquisition since like those first ads we were running. It would it would like change the growth trajectory of the company for like

months. And when you say social listening, I interpret that to mean you're sort of paying attention to the memes and themes that are playing out organically, not on paid ads, but on social media from user generated content and then incorporating those into your ad plays. >> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So, I mean, people are on Instagram. It's really weird to get an ad that does is not reflective of the content you're watching. And I think when people think of of Instagram or Facebook, like people's algorithms are very different, but and not everyone knows that like for a large subset of people, they're just getting the weirdest content you could possibly imagine. So, so like you know then this is like the majority. It's not the of of people, you know, whatever.

Like it's a it's a large subset. So we really leaned into that like this this this part of the internet that wasn't getting serviced by advertising, I think. >> Got it. And what um so so you joined 2019 and you start to get some of these initial wins and it sounds like you as you started to gain momentum and as Calm to its credit started to put more and more resources behind your team cuz it was working you started to build more infrastructure and processes around social listening and understanding what the latest memes were and incorporating that into your playbook. What sort of

metrics were you focused on as this was happening? And I imagine there were some some sort of more traditional standard performance metrics you were looking at, but any surprising ones in addition to those more standard ones? >> You know, as we were developing the creative program and kind of being best-in-class there, I think the other thing we were doing was getting best-in-class in measurement and like predictive measurement, how we were able to pass signals down to channels. So, we really were looking things just at like a pure ROI perspective like LTV CAC and usually on like a pretty long time horizon. Um, so having like really good predictive analytics on on what each cohort users of users would pay at a creative level was really important. And this is something I've seen I saw at calm that it has never been as big of a deal anywhere else I've worked. But the user quality based on advertisement was

insane. I mean, we would have certain ads that would only convert at like 5% from a trial to purchase and then like some ads that converted all the way up to 60 or 70%. >> So, like really dialing in the messaging and the the visual like it was it was crazy to see how much the visual like just a a visual could impact who receives that and who converts. Um, and it's easy I think to just be like, "Oh, that's noise. There's nothing there."

But this is like stuff we saw at like, you know, massive spend. So it was pretty obvious that it was it was real.

Any through lines in terms of ad concepts you've seen work particularly well when it comes to conversion? So, not just in terms of driving views or clicks, but in terms of actually driving subscriber conversion as opposed to those ads that maybe perform well at the top of the funnel, but they flame out when it comes to converting trailers into subscribers. At that time, there was a lot of stuff like the standard practice was like let's you should do a 10 to 15 second ad and that's like the the belief system. And what we actually saw is that usually like the top of funnel would be no different between like a 10-second and a 60 minute 60-second ad, but we had this like opportunity to qualify customers so much more and like continue just like rolling with value propositions and really like digging into personas and like demonstrating value. So a lot of times the customers that would come to

us were just way more qualified and those would often time you know that's why we started getting this long format was just the user quality was so much better and then >> um yeah sleep versus anxiety sort of what you talked about or like subsets of emotional issues like tended to convert at different rates. Yeah. Yeah. So there's just so many I mean I don't even know where to start. There's so many dimensions that we could dig into there.

It makes sense though at a high level and I'm more of a product driven growth expert than a marketing expert and so I always love having conversations with people like you because I I end up learning so much. But it makes sense to me that a longer ad unit, a 60-second versus a 15-second video means that for the people who are actually sticking around and watching it through to the end or close to the end, then if they click through, you're probably going to have a lot more drop off. But if they click through, they're much more likely to convert because the fact that they spend an entire minute of their time watching your ad is in itself an indicator that they have higher intent.

So is that part of the idea is if you're not just optimizing for top of funnel, you're actually optimizing for conversion and those longer form ad units are are providing more signal. You just get more of an opportunity to sell. And if for the people who are 15 seconds in and are undecided, like you lose them by cutting it short. Um, and I think you probably see a lot of these mechanics too in your product product uh product growth stuff like you know the apps that are killing it right now. So oftent times have these like insane quizzes that make you just like want to like >> die when you open them up like as a growth expert you like you're just like when is this thing going to end?

But um yeah, you're right. Just >> you're right. It's such a good analogy and it's something I talk to a lot of my clients about, which is obviously it depends on the product and it depends on the target customer and there are all sorts of nuances. You it's not a one-sizefits-all thing. Uh and I', you know, and I've written LinkedIn posts about All Trails's onboarding funnel on the one hand versus NS on the other, right? Because if you're joining All Trails, chances are if you're downloading the app, you're like out on the trail ready to go record your hike.

Whereas, if you're somebody coming to N, and I had Brent, who's their uh VP of product growth on the podcast, he talked about how if you're if you're coming to N and trying to lose weight on N, chances are you've tried many other programs before and they haven't worked. And so, the onboarding quiz actually serves a purpose, which is to build your confidence that this is going to be a highly personalized, tailored solution for your specific needs, not another one-sizefits-all solution that ultimately isn't going to work. And so even though you may lose some lower intent users through long onboarding quizzes like that, the ones who make it through will be much higher intent and ultimately that's what matters because they're the ones paying you and and driving revenue for the business. And so it sounds like there's an analog here in terms of ad strategy.

>> Yeah. And I think there's something to say there too on just overall growth strategy like you know for all trails or my client Finch like Finch is similar like the onboarding is super fast. the strategy is just more so based around like having an amazing product experience, sharing it with friends, etc. And the price point is really low. So like what's even the what's even the point? You just have a much more top off ofunnel strategy. Mhm.

>> And it's interesting seeing that be very successful like kind of against the broader backdrop of these ns or like you know the Russian Ukrainian groups which are like so locked into monetization and just have this like you know it's it's really fascinating incredible watching these people like as a case study but but you know the the the the approach should be different and the creative should be as a result. Like, you know, there's so much there, not just in how you sell, but in how you're going to position your brand and like play the sort of like short-term monetization game versus like long-term brand game. Yeah, it's there's a lot of layers.

>> Yeah, for sure. Well, and it's another instance in where being contrarian often pays off because if you're just doing what everyone else is doing, then you end up not standing out, which as an advertiser is not a good thing. So let's talk a little bit more about how your team and its strategy evolved over the course of the nearly four years you were at calm u because as you said when you joined it was it was sort of blue ocean opportunity and performance marketing.

There was there was a lot more low hanging fruit but I imagine that changed over the course of the four years you were there. There were a lot more consumer subscription apps that really started to gain momentum during that time. Um there was also the pandemic which changed dynamics and then I think it was towards the end of your time at calm but that was I think it was 2021 when Apple released SK ad network and you had app tracking transparency restrictions which which also changed the game and so what were some of the

key inflection points that that forced your team to evolve its thinking while you were at comp? running into market resistance is really it's easy to be excited when you have all the tailwinds at a certain point you realize that you're not going to get more growth unless you really dig down and like you know get into better technical like better better operational processes. So yeah, like I said, getting way better on the val on the measurements and the measurement stuff and like the signals.

Um, that's something I think after people hit like their first point of resistance, that's a really great place to get dig into on the media buying side. Really understanding the importance of having alternative growth levers other than direct response is super critical. It's like really hard to build a good business if you're just like going to lean on paid acquisition. Um, and to that note, like for people who monetize like Calm, I've never seen another business who has as strong of a growth engine outside of direct response. You know, you have this amazing PR and like kind of cultural or organic, social, life cycle, just classic marketing engine. Um, and then like also the B2B engine. And I think that really helped continue to grow the that really helped grow the continue to grow the business when there was larger like market headwinds as well. Just more >> competit more competitive in the space.

um and really like entrenched calm against what I think became like with you said SK ad network like that was pretty destructive for advertisers for a while and >> and if if calm was just paid acquisition like it it would have been really really really bad uh but you know they were able the able to make it through all right >> well and it sounds like part of the reason they were able to make it through was because they did have such an organic growth flywheel. And so as much as you were spending, you mentioned $100,000 a day. So that's what, $3 million a month you were spending on paid ads when you joined. And I can only imagine how much it was by the time you left. But on top of that, you have this halo of for every user you're acquiring, for every subscriber you're converting through paid ad channels, you're getting some sort of word of mouth halo on top of that, which then has another positive

effect because it means if you've done your homework, you know that you can spend more on the margins to acquire a user through paid ad channels because they're going to lead to some amount of organic users on average. And so you can sort of muscle out competitors through those paid channels. Is that how your team thought about it? No, I mean I think that is like the way most advertisers will oftent times go down the slippery slope of spending more money on paid. Um, and I think that can work like that. I mean, I think especially when you look at like games were coming or like gaming or apps were coming right out of the the gate and like having like a sort of tailwind behind them on the newness like that K factor can be really real. Uh, but it can be kind of a slippery slope as well.

Uh, but I really mean like a real growth engine that lives outside of paid acquisition like and isn't really dependent on ratcheting up and down the spend, but is like really hard to that thing that's like really hard to measure and sort of a reflection of like having so many different touch points that it literally becomes impossible to measure. Um, which yeah, it's hard to even talk about. It's like it's hard to even qualify what that is, >> but if I'm understanding correctly, it's some combination of PR, staying in the news, being buzzworthy, having people talking about you on social media, offline, and so as a result, you're not just relying on money in, money out, because you're it's like it's sort of this echo chamber you're creating where people are just constantly talking about call.

>> Yeah, exactly. And the paid ads help for that, but it it's it's hard it's it's easy I think it's easier to think of the paid ads as like the cleanup crew for that as opposed to the the uh as opposed to like necessarily the demand driver. >> Yeah. It's really more about demand capture because as long as the need is there and you have a good product then it's just connecting people with the with the product that's already meeting the demand that they have. So what what

do the results look like? you were there from early 2019 through to um 2022. To the extent you could talk about it, you know, what sort of topline business impact did column experience in terms of subscriber and subscription revenue growth? And then at a more micro level, how did performance marketing efficiency improve over that time? >> Um well, directly from my paid social work, uh I know we did we picked up like 1.2 two million subscribers through just like the paid acquisition um on on on paid social. Um, I think we added like, you know, I a lot of the other subscribers were through pretty much all the rest of the subscribers were either organic or we added a lot through partnerships and not just like the B2B partnerships, but these like Amex partnerships that you just, you know, these these partnerships that you would not expect, you know, like a lot of people do the deals with >> Spotify or credit cards or Kaiser

Permanente like these these these massive B2B deals can be huge. It was kind of coming from all places for sure. But we we did our did our work and in the terms terms of like unit economics I I mean I think at that scale what you realize is it's not about making your unit economics better. It's about sustaining your unit economics because you're >> you're just going to be dealing with with attrition like the whole time. And so I think uh what we saw for sure is that when we didn't we made 5,500 ads over my time there when when things were going more at the five or 10 ads a week deal what we saw was about in an attrition to our CAC of like 10% a week as opposed to like 01 a week or whatever you know when we were really cranking.

>> Got it. And so a lot of Yeah, that makes a ton of sense to me. I mean you're basically fighting gravity, right? as you expand and as you accelerate your spend or even just your organic growth, you move further and further beyond your early adopters because they're the ones who find you first. And so as a result, LTVs tend to go down, CACs tend to go up, and eventually the unit economics don't work anymore. And so even a worldclass performance marketing team is unlikely to just improve LTV or reduce CAC indefinitely. Their goal should be to keep CAC about the same or degraded at the slowest rate possible while the company grows faster and faster.

>> Yeah. And then you can afford, you know, you're you're getting recurring revenue. You're be able to like handle a larger you're able to keep growing and pushing and um I think another thing there though is there is just a natural ceiling to any market and uh and there's a natural limit to every market. So, I think a lot of people in growth, they see that first in like part of the S-curve and they just think they're just going to grow forever and it's always like a conversation to set expectations and be realistic. Yeah. I feel like the S-curve has almost become the like secret symbol of the growth profession.

It's even it's in our logo for subversive. It's sort of a hidden S-curve. And so, it's always fun when another growth growth professional brings up the S. Well, speaking of S's,

so you are now the owner of your own performance marketing agency called Tensale. Um, there are a lot of marketing agencies out there. So, I'm curious to hear from your own perspective as the founder, what is it that makes Tenskell different? Like, how do you guys try to take a contrarian approach and and you you you write a blog called the metag game? Like, how do you stay ahead of the metag game? >> I guess maybe just starting with the question of h of how do we differ? I think a lot of these things I learned at column around cultural relevance or and like social listening, cultural insight, how to like scale through datadriven uh frameworks and like that sort of consistency uh combined with the swagger like that's like a lot of tense scale like we have I think we're different in that we have a real philosophical point of view like we really only work with social impact businesses for the most are, you know,

we work very heavily in this like mental health or like educational uh landscape and that comes from a philosophical point of view and then we also have a strong like cultural and aesthetic point of view. So, we are I think just really on the money when it comes to like whatever the most relevant c like internet trend is or like um like able to sort of like create the sense of of suspended reality for people on socials where they're like not sure if they're seeing an ad or if they're seeing uh seeing content. And like um I think the other part of that is like a really strong cultural attunement that flows through to our copywriting. So we just have extremely punchy and um copywriting crazy tactics. A lot of we're religious about our competitor intelligence. So, we have, you know, a lot of copy frameworks that we developed through that that I think, you know, we still got an edge um on the

metag game in that I stopped publishing to the metag game because now I'm really in it competing again. And uh >> you don't want to reveal your secrets. >> Yeah. I mean, I've the metag game is I think what I realized is that the metag game is an attempt to expand my impact outside of myself and give back in a way that I received. Um, like Eric Seir when I first got into gaming, he wrote he had a great like user acquisition 101 ramp up and I used that to like really quickly understand how to how to be a user acquisition manager.

And I realized when I was doing that for ads, there was no one who there was no there was no source material of like how do you actually do this? >> And I wanted to put people on game with what I had learned over my time. And I think the a lot of people would like feel like oh well you're just creating your own competitors. But I think actually there's a really interesting thing there when you contribute to a community you like create a community and by allow by giving people resources to be successful you create uh a much richer ecosystem. So when it comes to the metag game like and staying ahead of the metag game like I don't I try not to that's that's not really my framing.

It's like I'm in it I'm in it with the people who are in this ecosystem and and we're all we're all like working on it together. >> Yeah. Well, I couldn't agree more with that. I mean, first of all, I don't think it's a zero sum game. And I think when you have really intelligent people who are working on a problem together, even if they're semicompetitive, right, you can expand the pie. And I also think that um if you're one of the very best then the value of putting your ideas out there is far greater than the cost of having other people copy them. And I'll even share a personal anecdote which is Casey Winters is one of my biggest growth role models, product and marketing driven expert who spent time at GrubHub and Pinterest before ultimately becoming one of the OG growth adviserss. He's now working on a company called Superme that allows you to create an AI avatar of yourself. and I just

created my own AI avatar and superme and uploaded all of my podcast content, all of my course content, all of my LinkedIn thought leadership. And it's definitely a bit of a gamble, right? Because you're putting a lot of your a lot of your secret sauce out there. But I also think with AI now, like the game is changing so fast that it almost doesn't matter because the only way to maintain an edge is to constantly be immersed in your field and and improving yourself every day. And so sharing secrets from even a week or a month ago is to me it's only positive because it advances the community and it's an opportunity to give back. But also like if you're not learning new secrets every week then you're doing something wrong anyways.

>> Yeah. I mean it's definitely true. You always have to be evolving. That's something I definitely learned in my first career. >> Well let's talk about how you're evolving things at Tensale because I think one thing I hear constantly right I mean everybody's feeling this right. the pace of innovation with AI has become so blistering that you've always got to be looking for that next edge, that next opportunity. I think that's even more more true in your world performance marketing than it is in product because product moves a little bit more slowly simply because it t it often takes more effort to like ship a new release as it than it does to put a new creative on Meta or Tik Tok. So,

what are some of the biggest changes you've seen over the last year in terms of how AI is impacting performance marketing? It really can't be understated how big like the Open AI uh I forget what release it was with their latest image model that was able to do like full realistic full text and then Sora now like that really was a point of no return where it's just like the the that gap between what's real and what's fake closed and that has massive implications for for marketing uh for so many reasons like obviously it's driving production costs to near zero which is allowing more people to get involved etc. Um but you know that has huge impacts on society um etc. But it's really hard to know where the future is going to going to lie. So, it's kind of it's I think it's better not to overthink it. Like you said, just take it like one week at a time. and try to figure out what the next best thing

is. Like try it's good to take big bold bets on the future like at 10 scale we there's like a project we're working on where it's like the vision is like fully autonomous ads that even though it's like a hedge like I don't really know that's an experiment um uh against like you know I come from a background where financial markets are fully automated and if you didn't get on board with that you just got run over. If that's the direction that advertising is going, you're in a position where you have to develop that that tooling. But I would probably much rather prefer if AI goes into a direction where it just opens up the gates of what is creatively possible.

>> And that's another direction where we where we really put a lot of attention and where we have more success to be honest. like just executing on these concepts that really like just make your brain go, "Wait a minute, like what the hell just happened? What did I just see?" Um like that that's a much more interesting thing to me and and probably where we spend most of our time. AI is just like one of the things it's amazing at is information consolidation. So, it's really incredible at like I I think we find it really useful as well for like angle development, copywriting development, not the actual writing of the copy, but like helping us to generate insights.

>> Yeah, I I find that in my work as well, right? It's it's very good when you have this broad ambiguous corpus of information and you want to distill it down into some of the most important insights that you as a human can then use to inform your own strategic thinking. I think it's less good at the last mile, right? And maybe at some point that closes, but I think the last mile still belongs to a human expert for now. We'll see how long that lasts. Um, one thing I want to return to, you talked about this social listening idea, and I just find that so fascinating. So,

what does that actually look like at Tensale? Like, what I could guess, but what platforms are you spending your time paying attention to? How do you gather signal from across those platforms? To what extent is it you as a taste maker actually going onto Instagram or Tik Tok yourself and and experiencing these ads firsthand versus using technology and algorithms to sort of synthesize that signal. What does that look like? The social listening comes from everywhere. I mean like we are kids who grew up like going to land parties and like on like early Reddit on like geo cities on like >> you know gamers who are on like IRC which you know eventually essentially be that's what Slack based their product on. The way we think about it is we try to figure out when the esoteric crosses over into the mainstream. That's like the perfect activation moment. There's a really great book about that called The

Creative Curve. Um, which I think has been one of the best framings as a marketer that I've ever found is that you want to be constantly positioning yourself on the place that that is differentiated enough to capture attention, but familiar enough to >> to like for people to understand it. And you know, so we're on all of like the social obvious major socials like Instagram, Tik Tok, etc., but we're also like in all these really weird places like that have signal and trying to figure out when like the when something is entering that like Overton window, that cultural zeitgeist, and then just sniping it.

>> How do you know when that inflection point is happening? Are there particular signals that you've identified? I mean the big thing I think I think like it becomes obvious at a certain point like the algorithm just is like blowing up and I think like for most people whose like algorithm is like nature photos or some something like I worked with I worked on this project with my friend where we did this like MS Paint wizard for one of my clients and it was it just went like m and it was based on my social listening and it went massively viral But when he when I got looped in more into the project, like I we started an an Instagram for the page and it was based on his algorithm. I just saw it was literally like nature photos and like you know the like I think that sort of average everyday person. But like if you're looking at an algorithm of someone at 10 scale, it is like the most dark like bottom scraping of the

internet thing you've ever seen. just like crazy brain rot, like just uh the the wildest stuff ever. And you see the engagement between these two things, like you know, someone who's at the beginning of the portal versus someone who's gone all the way to the bottom >> and it's actually pretty popular at the bottom. There's way more engagement and it's going crazy. So, you know, we're just kind of doing those deep dives, figuring out what the these little algorithmic pockets and bringing them back to the surface. Yeah. Well, it sounds like a fascinating world to be part of and and I imagine that AI is unlocking entirely new ways of doing what you do. Well, let's let's get to

our lightning round. So, I'm going to ask you a handful of rapidfire questions. You could just give me quick, you know, one minute responses. And we'll start with one that I always like to lead with and that's just what was the best part about working at Column when you were there and what's one thing that you would have changed? >> Uh the best part absolutely the culture and the people. I mean it was it was like it was almost too crazy to believe at that time. I mean you're talking about one of the hottest startups in the world. Uh moving to San Francisco feeling in the peak of the big of that big boom consumer boom. um low interest rates. Uh so just like I mean that vibe was crazy but then the people itself like Alex will he's a calm president now he's amazing. Uh but uh Michael Actton Smith Alex too I mean these are like legendary entrepreneurs who are just some of the most crazy creative people

you could ever imagine. And I once remember we did this we did this brainstorm with with Alex too where he talked about like the the theme was 100 ways to make more money at calm >> and >> and he he started and he never stopped talking. He he never ran out of ideas and like that understanding of like how of that someone could be like that I think was >> you know really inspiring. Um yeah, just all the people on the I mean on the engineering side, the data side, the content side, everyone was world class and so having that rub off on me and now being able to be educated from that was um the best part. Sorry I kept it I made it over a minute, but um I think one thing I would change is I just wish I could have worked with those people even more. I mean when you're in user acquisition, you're so heads down just cranking on those >> those things. But uh but I would say that other people had a larger impact on

my career and and my uh in who I am. So just wish I could have downloaded more. >> Yeah, it sounds like a really inspiring place to have been and I've certainly had those moments in my career as well. Um this may be a tough one. What What is the most successful or one of the most successful ads you've ever run and why do you think it did so well? >> There's been some obvious ones. Uh the the I mean like the 3D oddly satisfying stuff took it really to another level.

Um those were situations where we just like rocket launch the growth of the company. Um, I think those were in spend the most successful. But the one that I think opened up the floodgates for understanding of like how good weird could be is we were working with Tube Science and they did this uh this fried egg like as the hook where they crack a fried egg in the frying pan and like you know at that point we I think our ads just were not competitive at all and it was another sort of like rocket launch.

It was a moment where we like doubled our growth overnight because of a fried egg and I think that was pretty insane. >> What was the connection between the fried egg and calm? I assume that was sort of the hook but then what what was the point where you sort of pivoted that into why somebody should try calm? >> Um I think it was like that the hook was like uh before I used to hit snooze seven times now I wake up feeling refreshed or something. Um, >> so it was like this notion that if you could get a night good night's sleep, I think like the visual representation and then there's something about eggs like even now like I see people do eggs all the time.

>> Um, and there's a I think an inside joke for anyone who's like worked at Col around them. I mean, yeah, even like >> Yeah, it's it's a thing. >> It's like cats. Cats launched the internet. Now you've got eggs. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, eggs are the real cats. No one knows that, but >> All right. Well, there's there's your insider secret. Um, what's one thing that you think most modern performance marketers get wrong?

>> I think most people over like estimate their the impact they can make solely as a performance marketer. Like I think like performance marketers are so likely to be like sort of the shorts stop or like the you know the point guard of the business or whatever. or maybe the power foil for the guy who scores the points takes the assist. >> Um that they kind that it's easy for for performer smart hitters to feel like they're the ones making all of the impact. But um yeah, I think like the most important thing of any insanely successful product is uh is definitely like incredible product execution, incredible product growth execution. And then, you know, we are the power forwards that score the points, but it's it's it's everyone else is the it does the does the most of the work. Yeah.

Well, that I mean, that's really cool for a marketer to say cuz I think it's true. I mean, I grew up playing defense and soccer and, you know, in a way it was like all you could do was not screw up and give up a goal where while the strikers were getting all the glory. uh but you know I think I think it's true that ultimately value creation is the foundation for everything else and value creation typically comes from the engineering and product teams first and foremost having said that I think what AI has done is it has made it so much cheaper and easier to create new products that the bottleneck is now shifting on the margins to value delivery because there are so many products out there and the world has become so noisy that all else being equal I do think marketers have become much more valuable over the last five simply because the app ecosystem has gotten so crowded and people's attention

spans have gotten so short that a really good marketer can make a huge amount of difference and I think you've proven that with your work at calm and tinscale. So, uh I love I love the modest response and I would also say uh maybe you aren't giving yourself enough credit. >> Um >> Oh, thank you. >> A couple more here. So, what is one secret you have for staying ahead of the curve with your creatives? I mean, you've already talked about this a little bit with the creative b curve book and your social listening, but any other secrets to impart on aspiring performance marketers out there?

>> I mean, yeah, you just got to stay hungry. I think I mean, the world is always changing. You just got to be adaptable and stay on it. Like, what works today is not going to work tomorrow. Um, so I I don't think you want to I think I was talking about this, you actually don't want to be ahead of the curve. You want to be on the curve. you want to, >> you know, having your eyes on where things are going is important, but like just being like extremely adaptable to whatever is happening, I think is even better.

>> Yeah, I agree. There is a sweet spot. And I loved how you talked about you got to be differentiated enough to stand out in a feed that has gotten ever more crowded and distracting, but you also have to be familiar enough that somebody's going to want to stop and pay attention. and and it sounds like that's the secret to staying on that curve which is a moving target. Um last one is how do you think AI is going to change the world of digital marketing in the next 2 to 3 years? It's just going to lower the barrier to entry for a lot of reasons like you said with products on the production side. I mean on the language side too like the best marketers in the world right now by far are Eastern Europeans and it's not even close and there's a lot of people in these emerging markets where now they can do like crazy production and compete. Um it's AI also is like an incredible education tool. So you know

it's just going to democratize that. And so I think probably I would just expect the digital marketing world to get more competitive. Um, but I also think it'll give people an opportunity to do some really incredible executions and like get super creative and weird with stuff. So in a way it will like flatten the average but probably like reward kind of the outliers. >> Yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense to me. I mean I think competition The more competition ratchets up and AI is certainly a catalyst for increased competition both on product and marketing, the more it leads to copycat behavior which will flatten the average if I'm understanding your language correctly. But then at the same time, more competition leads to more pressure and more pressure often leads to some really outstanding work being done and so hopefully we will see some of that as well. Uh well, this has been such a

pleasure as I knew it would be. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Nick, and talking about your experience at Column and now uh more recently launching Tensale. Any parting words you want to share with the audience before we wrap up? >> Yeah, I would say if you're wondering how you want to uh spend your time professionally, definitely focus on social impact, focus on making a positive contribution in the world, join us. uh people like myself and Phil who are in this in this subscription ecosystem working with awesome businesses and uh you know yeah focus focus on impact.

>> Awesome. Well said. Well, thanks again Nick. This has been a lot of fun.