Startup Growth and Customer Retention with Jamie Quint, Head of Growth at Notion | Remote Students
Members of the Remote Students Community had the opportunity to meet Jamie Quint this week and ask him questions about his experience as head of growth. Apply here to join our invite-only community and meet our amazing lineup of guest speakers, including people like Jamie!
Jamie Quint is currently the Head of Growth at Notion, the all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and more. Prior to Notion, Jamie was the Sr. Director of Product, Monetization at Reddit where he built out the revenue product org from scratch into a powerhouse team which completely revamped the Reddit Ads business, leading to 3x+ revenue growth ($XXm to $XXXm) in only 2 years.
Prior to Reddit, Jamie Co-founded Interstate Analytics in 2015 to help companies accurately understand their marketing performance in a complex, multi-channel, multi-device advertising world. They were part of the Y Combinator Winter 2016 class. Additionally, Jamie has consulted with top tier companies on digital marketing, marketing analytics, product analytics, and data science for product and digital marketing applications. (Clients included: Twitch, Teespring, Everlane, Credit Sesame, etc)
What is the difference between growth and marketing?
When I think about growth, I think about product-oriented growth and deep involvement with changing things in the product to drive user acquisition, retention, and other key metrics. When I think about marketing, I think about performance marketing (like Google, Facebook and social media presence) to drive leads and be directive about measuring the metrics from that. The other side of marketing is the brand advertising side: using messages and graphics to change the perception of the company in users’ mind. I think there’s always a close partnership with the two teams, but that these specializations, especially the brand advertising aspect, make them unique and impactful in their own ways.
What’s the framework for how you think about building your efforts and campaigns?
The starting point is to know the best practices in the industry (e-commerce, fintech, etc.), and you can get that from either personal experience or talking to people with a lot of experience. From there, you’re doing experimentation on things that are not similar to what other companies have done, testing at a high level what really works, and optimizing from there.
What is the most important aspect of growing a company, especially like Notion?
Notion is part of a new class of companies that use a bottoms-up framework, similar to Dropbox. The old way to make money selling software was to build a very complicated product, hire a bunch of sales person to create leads and make deals, and generate a lot of money. Now, it’s much more common to have a company like Notion with an individual use-case, which grows into small teams, large teams, companies, to lots of big companies using the product. What this means for Notion is creating a really good product that people love, optimizing the flows within that to make sure its easy to invite other people, and make sure that people get value out of the product: that’s what drives big enterprise deals at the end of the day.
What is the role of marketing in a product-led growth strategy?
It’s all about having a coherent representation to the world of who you are. For a company like Notion, which is product-led, you still need to have high-quality creative testing, put together well-formed and branded landing pages, storytelling around the customer, have case studies, and more. I think many people underestimate that; you still need all of those aspects to deliver a unified story and have consistent brand representation and of what your company is to the world, which is what that relationship is between growth and marketing.
How do you think about setting growth goals?
To drive revenue and metrics in the long term, you have to have a sustainable strategy over a few years, and break that down into sub metrics and chase those goals. Really, we are mapping specific goals and sub metrics to long-term revenue and user retention.
What is the value of inbound marketing and community building?
I think a lot of companies don’t support and invest in community building enough. At Notion, if you write in as someone who doesn’t pay Notion anything, and ask a relatively complex question, you will still get a response or answer within 24 hours. This kind of treatment is undervalued by most companies. Inbound marketing and community building isn’t really something I would give advice about, but rather advocate to do because it will really pay off in the long-term.
How much of your work is on upselling existing customers vs. onboarding new ones?
It's a little bit of both. Onboarding is such a key component of what makes people stay around. In terms of upselling existing customers, I think it's less of upselling them and more of increasing retention and engagement on the platform. Sometimes, focusing too much on ways to optimize for more revenue can drive the wrong decisions, so it should be more about giving the consumers what they want.
What are some strategies to increase customer retention?
At the end of the day, it comes down to having good analytics in place and good qualitative analysis. I think of retention as removing barriers in the user's way of accomplishing their goals. You can’t build a great product by “growth hacking”, you have to have something that people want to use and making it as easy as possible for them to do so. Some barriers include having too many steps in the signup process, the customer altogether forgetting, and other things that would stop them from being successful with the product. Onboarding is one of the most important aspects when it comes to this, and there is the question of “What is the ‘aha’ moment that the user sees the value of the product?”. Identifying what that is and being good at removing the barriers that prevent users from coming to that point can really drive retention. Ideally, you also want to be in a place where you create virtuous cycles of engagement.
What was your shift in strategy when going from Reddit to Notion?
It was wildly different. By the end of my time at Reddit, I was managing 6 or 7 product managers and supporting a lot of different teams, so my week became all meetings. When I came to Notion, it was a lot more on the operation side where I was scoping products, building out advertising campaigns, and strategies. Since I worked on monetization at Reddit, it was also very enterprise-based, so I think the work I did at Notion was driven more by customer retention and growth loops.
How do the sales and growth teams work together at Notion?
What has become confusing is that a lot of companies are calling their customer-success teams, part of growth, when it’s really a part of what the sales team works on. At Reddit, the sales team had really valuable touch points with customers, small teams, and businesses every day to figure out exactly what they want and need and what they are having problems with. All of that info feeds back into product-order prioritization, how much revenue each feature might be worth to the business, and all of these types of things.
Once you get past the typical playbook for growth, how do think about moving forward in growth strategies?
Generally, there tends to be a lot more obvious strategies than you think. The first step is to create a product that users really want, with great product-market fit. There is also not much value in moving past typical playbooks when the product doesn’t bring value to the customer. In terms of coming up with new ideas, it just comes down to brainstorming, playing at other products intentionally and looking at them at a growth standpoint, and communicating with people to find inspiration.
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Watch the whole recording on our Youtube to hear more resources on implementing growth strategies, insider tips, and stories from Jamie about his time at Reddit, Notion, and experience with clients like Twitch.
