Growth Interview Series : #3 Franco Varriano
(Director of Content & Growth, Guides.co)
Franco Varriano has been an entrepreneur since the age of 11. He’s currently the co-founder and co-host of HackToStart — a podcast focused on interesting people and the innovative ways they achieve success—. He’s also the Director of Startup Grind Ottawa and the director of content & growth @GuidesHQ.
Could you tell me a little bit about your background in Growth/Internet Marketing?
Throughout my “career” (if you can call it that yet), I’ve always been in a position to help grow products, sales, and the client base through new technologies and different marketing channels.
With AIESEC, the organization had yet to really leverage burgeoning social media platforms like Twitter in 2008/2009 for recruitment, partnerships and business development. I helped bring those to the forefront of one of their biggest Canadian chapters in Ottawa.
By the time I got to Guides.co I had a much better and wider understanding of digital marketing and growth tactics so I was more effective at launching measurable experiements and campaigns, using different tools (from spreadsheets to analytics or languages like Ruby on Rails).
2. How you got started with Growth?
My first opportunities at growth came during university as I tried to increase adoption for a few of my mobile apps.
I learned how to build communities, test and use marketing channels like ads, and started to dive into technical product onboarding “hacks” to reduce friction and appeal to bigger and bigger markets.
With Guides.co, we actually started off with a much smaller, niche market tested called StartupPlays.com. The idea was to see if entrepreneurs would be will to pay for market-proven “project plans” — which we called Plays. This was more about the content then the platform at the time, but it helped us validate some of the main hypothesis we had about the market and industry at the time, mostly:
- What are the main feature sets that will make this product valuable to entrepreneurs?
- What are the biggest challenges content producers and consumers have today?
- What are the different business models to make this sustainable?
- Will anyone pay for this?
StartupPlays grew very quickly through a few really simple channels: email marketing, social, press, and by leveraging existing forms and communities to attract new users. The goal was always much bigger and more ambitious (it still is)… but growth can be very dangerous is it isn’t pursued in stages. Likewise, it can also be impossible without those stages to help you build a baseline to grow off of.
3. What is a day in the life of Franco Varriano ?
I feel like it’s pretty average to other entrepreneurs, except the early rising thing. I love sleep and try to get at least 6–8 hours per day. Otherwise I just don’t feel effective.
In terms of structure, I use a modified version of Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal to stay on point and really prioritize important tasks for the day. I have between 3–5 main task that I try to accomplish each day in 3 main working sprints (one between 10–12, 2–4, and again from 6–8 — on super busy days I’ll sneak another one in from 10–12).
In between all that I get to meetings, emails, calls, and try to get up and move around or do walk and talks (around the block) with different people on the team. I feel like it’s important to not always be in front of a computer screen/sitting down (although I’ve also started to use a standing desk about two months ago and love it. No treadmill desks though — I’m definitely not coordinated enough to handle all that).
4. Why is growth hacking interesting?
I think growth hacking is interesting because of the immediate results it can deliver if done correctly. It also enables scale which is equally exciting.
I mean, growth hacking is basically the ability to find large “pockets” of potential users and then finding a way to:
1) effectively educate them about your product and why they’d love it,
2) create immediate desire to join/buy/download etc
3) then make it super easy to fulfill #2
There’s actually a 4th step if you want sustainable growth (which every smart business does, but I feel like it doesn’t get enough attention). This is:
Provide enough value/triggers to create retention
5. What fundamental technical skills would a Growth Hacker need to posses?
I’m interpreting “technical” in the its most broadest sense, like what are some of the skill, not technical as in “how specific programing talents do I need to have?”.
Being able to crealy explain your value proposition is a technical skill.
Being able to purposefully craft concise and effective copy is a technical skill.
Being able to identify and craft accurate user personas and then actually find those people IRL is a technical skill.
So all these elements, in addition to having specific developer abilities (like throwing up a landing page with an email capture integration) or scraping the content from a site or writing a crawler of some kind are all critical.
It really depends on your product and industry. Because if you take even some of these basic skills and apply it to an older market where absolutely no one is even thinking about applying these tactics, you’ll make a killing. In the startup industry, this are some of the basics you need to at least have an understanding of.
6. What are some good interview questions when hiring a growth hacker/internet marketer?
Not sure I can speak to this. I’ve never been in a position where I needed to hire a growth hacker. However, if I had to, here’s what I’d consider:
- What the industry I’m in is (B2B or B2C have different challenges and objectives, this is further compounded by the niche and target audience). This would influence the kind of growth hacker I was looking for and what skills/experience they’d need
- What my main objective is (more users, more sales, etc) — there is a big difference between the two and activities. they are inherently related
Now having said that, as someone who’s looking to get hired by a company for growth, here’s how I’d approach it (cause the secret is that if you’re the right fit for them, they can’t afford to not hire you).
- Really examine the company from the outside. Where are the gaps? Where are the opportunities? And most importantly — what are the specialties that you bring to the team / areas that you’re the master of?
- Develop and actual plan. What are you going to do, when, how often and what are the targets and then ROI of those targets. For example I always hear people say they’re going to run ads or blog to grow… That fine, but on what subjects, how often, how are you going to promote, what are the objectives for each posts in terms of views, conversions, costs, return, LTV or MRR that they will deliver. You need to impress.
- Simultaneously, follow the founders and executives online. Learn about them, what are their views, opinions, what do they share, what have they read etc. Working this into your pitch to them in a non-creepy, “wow, what a coincidence!” kinda way is the best way to stand out and show your level of interest and commitment.
7. Do you think internet marketer/growth hacker need to know how to code?
I think it’s important to be technically knowledgeable. Having a good understanding of how different components like web pages, APIs, servers etc. All work enable you to more easily exploit or leverage potential technical growth hacking opportunities. This can help you and your team know where to start or where to look.
Do I think that you need to be the actual person who then actually builds out the solution you’ve envisioned in this first step? Not necessarily. But it certainly doesn’t hurt if you can☺. Especially in a resource strapped environment like a startup.
Just like I mentioned earlier, I think there are more “soft” or “social” growth hacking skills that also come into play.
8. What are the most productive ways to spend time on the internet?
The internet can be a huge time suck. I get lost on Twitter every once and a while but do find lots of awesome stuff.
I think the basic ways to be productive are to check out the right resources:
- reading blogs written by founders, or some blog written by startups like Buffer and intercom
- checking out amazing communities like Product Hunt, Inbound.org, growthhackers.com, growthhacker.tv, and Guides.co (tons of free and paid content)
- Podcasts (like Product Hunt Radio, Justin Jackson’s Product People, Alex Bloomberg’s StartUp, and [shameless plug] mine (HackToStart.com)
On that note I think it’s also important to unplug and be “unproductive” from time to time. My favorite app to do this in a “structured” way (if that makes any sense) is 5By. Love using that app to just discover lots of cool, short videos and share them with friends. I definitely use it at least once a day.
9. What advice you have for someone who wants to build a career in growth?
Ask questions, read everything, follow really smart people in the space (there are too many to name but here are some that come to mind right away):
- Sofia Quintero https://twitter.com/Sofiaqt (just interviewed her for Hack To Start so watch for that episode in a few weeks)
- Ryan Hoover https://twitter.com/rrhoover
- Aaron Ginnt https://twitter.com/aginnt
- Andrew Dumont https://twitter.com/AndrewDumont (spoke with him on Hack To Start here: http://hacktostart.com/andrew-dumont/ )
- Andrew Chen https://twitter.com/andrewchen
- Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown https://twitter.com/SeanEllis https://twitter.com/morganb
- Ryan Holiday https://twitter.com/RyanHoliday
- Justin Jackson https://twitter.com/mijustin
- Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares https://twitter.com/yegg & https://twitter.com/jwmares
Then go out and do something. Just try it. Keep getting back up (cause you’ll fail, everyone does) and try some more.
10. What’s the best way to contact you?
Twitter is always the best way to reach me immediately (for now at least) @FrancoVarriano.
Email is second best — franco@guides.co (I try to hit inbox 0 every day, but sometimes it takes a few days to get to everything).
