Brand Marketing, Product-Market Fit, & App Growth — Gessica Bicego, Paired

[00:00:00] **David:** Hello, I’m your host, David Barnard. With me today is RevenueCat CEO, Jacob Eiting. Our guest today is Gessica Bicego, Chief Marketing Officer at Paired, the number one app for couples. Prior to joining Paired, Gessica spent six years leading performance marketing and growth at Blinkist. On the podcast we talk with Gessica about how to approach brand marketing for apps, finding product channel messaging fit, and why you shouldn’t even refer to Bill Gates in an ad campaign. Hi, Gessica. Thanks so much for being on the podcast. Really looking forward to talking to you today. [00:00:54] **Gessica:** Thank you so much for having me. I’m super excited to be here. I’m a huge fan of this podcast. So are the co-founders of Paired. Hi, Kevin. Hi, Diego. Thank you for having me. [00:01:05] **David:** Yeah. I’ve actually had you on the list to invite as a guest since you were at Blinkist, but in the meantime you joined Paired. Tell me a bit about Paired, and what was so exciting about joining the team there. [00:01:18] **Gessica:** Of course, and I hope you’re ready for a cheesy story. Paired is a fun app for couples, designed to bring you closer together. So that’s the pitch, let me tell you more. We all know the romantic relationship we have with our partner is one of the most important ones we have. But still, I’m pretty sure, especially after a lot of years, a lot of kids, there’s not much time that goes into taking care of their relationship. That’s exactly what Paired does. Every day you have questions, quizzes, games to really connect with your partner, and have a healthier and happier relationship. Why I decided to join was I was during my maternity leave I had a call with Kevin, one of the co-founders, because he just wanted to get some advice. I gave him some advice, and then I checked out the app. I really loved it. I used it with my husband and it really, really helped us a lot. Then I had my baby and didn’t think about anything else. Then, back in October, I felt like, “Okay, I need to go back from my maternity leave.” I was really ready to take on a new challenge. That’s why I started to look around, see what the opportunities there are, but nothing really felt right. I just couldn’t find something that I really cared about. I need to believe in the product to join a company. I also wanted to lead the entire marketing department. I was talking with my husband, and I was like, “Something doesn’t fell right. You know, if it was something like Paired.” And literally one day after, Kevin texted me and said that they were looking for a CMO and if I knew somebody, and I was like, “That’s me!” [00:03:00] **Jacob:** The sliding into your DMS of founder. [00:03:02] **Gessica:** Yeah, exactly. So that worked, and that’s how I started to work there. And I think why I joined well, as I mentioned, I was. Ready to take a step up and start leading the entire marketing department before I was taking care of performance marketing growth, that is like one part of, you know, the game, but I really wanted to have the, the full overview. Another thing is that I just love early stage startups. That’s my passion. And, you know, I think it’s nice to work in an established business that is like eight, 10 years old, but he’s so much fun to be there at the beginning. You’re 20 people. You have an idea, boom. Like you realize that right away. It’s so much different. And, I don’t know. It just felt right. there’s a lot of, we are 24 people at the moment. We were 15 when I joined. So really with the small team, we are agile. We are fast, we are all professional. There’s also, I think something that they did right, is that they invested a lot in like having senior people at the beginning. And I think this is such. Great move because yes, you spend a bit of money, you know, on hiring, you know, good people, but then everyone knows what they’re doing. everyone is super independent, just feels amazing. And also the product. I mean, it’s about love and everyone loves love. And, you know, I think in the first month I received, an email from a, from a customer. And I literally started to cry. She was like, I’ve been with my husband for 15 years. I use her app and I feel more connected than ever. And she mentioned all these little things that she loved about her husband that she forgot about just made my day. So, yeah, [00:04:39] **Jacob:** Hmm, [00:04:39] **Gessica:** I. [00:04:40] **David:** That’s really cool working on something that you’re so passionate about. [00:04:44] **Jacob:** It makes, makes doing boring computer stuff all day a little bit easier. Right? [00:04:49] **Gessica:** Exactly. Exactly. And I mean, to be honest, also what I love about this is, similar to Blinkist. If you want. When I joined Blinkist, it was seven years ago. No one knew about it. I remember telling people, yeah, I worked for Blinkists. People were like, what, what is it? but then right now it’s a well established brand. Everyone knows it. Especially at the beginning, people were like, oh, why should I pay for like a five minutes, 15 minutes version of books? And people now are like, yes, I get it. And I think it’s really similar for like, you know, the relationship, side right now. People are like, Hmm, why do I have to pay for something like that? Why do I need to care even? So I think it’s really exciting to be the first, app, the first brand in this vertical and to make it famous and successful and more competitors will come. But you know, we are ready for that. [00:05:38] **David:** Yeah, that’s amazing. So one of the things that, that I know you’ve been thinking a lot about at Paired is brand marketing and how different your approach to that is from your blankest days of doing a lot heavier kind of performance marketing user acquisition. So I’m curious what. Why as part of pair, do you think brand marketing is gonna be so key to the long term success of the. [00:06:03] **Gessica:** Of course. So let’s start from the fact that I am more of a tech performance person. That’s where my expertise are. I started computer science and then I started marketing. So, you know, performance marketing is my sweet spot. I love it. And that’s what I did. My previous, jobs at kayak and at Blinkisters, I was the first person joining the [00:06:24] **Jacob:** I mean, that’s one of the things that I think Blinkist is really known for doing well. Like their performance marketing engine is, is, that’s why everybody knows what Blinkist is, right. Because it’s everywhere. [00:06:34] **Gessica:** Exactly exactly. And I mean, it’s working right is amazing. at the same side, I feel, I think that especially once you start having maybe an audience that is a bit broader, I think Blinkist is still targeting a little bit of a niche. If you think about it while for example, Paired, I mean is targeting everyone that is in that relationship. I think, you know, having a strong brand is so important. And for example, think about the dating apps. Like there are so many datings app out there, but Tinder is still the best one. And it’s because they, they feel like a super strong brand. It’s even like, it’s a, it’s like a common term, even if I never use a dating app, but it’s still so well known. So it. Such a difference, also performance marketing. I mean, we all know, it can become addictive. There’s only so much that you can grow. and also I think it’s also easy to replicate. Like I see now that, especially in the educational vertical, there’s so many new competitors coming up. It’s so hard to keep up and you know, maybe you were the first one doing these campaigns. But these people come in with like a small team, they copy what you’ve done and boom, they kind of steal everything. at the same time. Also, I think that when you’re talking about love, there’s so much emotions, you know, about that, that I feel that just focusing on performance marketing and what works, it will be. Just one side of it. so that’s why they decided to take a completely different approach and start from the zero building a strong brand that will be recognized that will be remembered and they will make actually our paid acquisition. A little bit easier, more sustainable, more long term. So the first thing I did is to hire someone that knows about brand, because as I mentioned, I’m the performance girl. But I I’m really excited about, you know, working more on this and I’ve been kind of like taking care of this transition, working with brand awareness tool, defining brand our brand book. But next week we have a new director of brand joining and I’m so excited about that. So we’ll see, we’ll see how it goes. [00:08:34] **David:** Where, where does a rubber meet the road for an app and actually thinking about brand marketing, you know, are you thinking about it as kind of a percentage of spend allocation? Are you thinking about it in terms of, you know, making sure that, all the ads kind of contribute to that brand? You know, cuz one of the things in the industry is that that ugly ads perform super well, but might not actually be good for your brand. So, so you see it as kind of. All encompassing thing, but then also something that you’re directly gonna put money into. [00:09:05] **Gessica:** Yeah, I think I see on both sides. So for me, brand is everything. Every time that you have a touchpoint with, you know, a user or potential user or your customer, that that’s where brand leaves. So it needs to be to transpire in every single, Ads message thing that you put out there. so for example, having like a strong, you know, brand island, using them for your ads and so on, but at the same time, I also think that if you just do that, that’s not enough to build a strong brand. You need to put budget behind and there are some. Platforms channels that are better at brand awareness than others. I’m thinking for example, about, you know, paid content, Albert and tabula, that’s a platform where I spent a lot of time on it’s a performance channel and everyone will uses the performance channel, but especially in some markets where the competition is not so high. Since you pay for CPC, you have so many impression that it actually becomes stronger than TV. so, you know, you can still do a lot of awareness campaigns without spending millions on TV because usually, you know, small startups, they don’t have that budget to spend. And TV is like a long term game. So I think, yes, allocating budget. But depending on the stage where you are, the company you’re working for, the startup, the product and so on. So in my case, I would actually be targeting this on both side and at the end of the day, what I’m willing, what I want to see in terms of results. That’s the hard part. How do you measure that is like, I want to have a more have. Yeah, this is the question that everyone asks . I want to have a healthy shares between paid and organic that’s at the end, what I want to see. And I also want to see the overall, my paid acquisition costs instead of becoming like higher and higher, they maybe stay at the same level or they even go down cuz you know, the more you spend, if you spend a million, if you spend 4 million, you can expect your conversion rate to go. What if by doing more awareness campaign, I’m able to actually maintain that conversion rate, even when I spend more performance marketing. And at the same time, I have a lot of organics coming in. That is the dream. how to do it. Yeah, that’s hard. [00:11:11] **David:** We need, we need to do a follow up podcast in a year and talk through all the, all the, the failures and [00:11:17] **Jacob:** Brand takes years. That’s the thing with brand, right? Like it’s not something you can, like, I Blinkist, I would say is an established brand, but that took years of performance marketing and, and I would say they have a really. you know, Blinkists brand when you think of it, right. It’s clean, it’s professional. Like it’s associated with learning. There’s like some very clean associations. I see Paired as a very obvious place where that I think you can build a, a very different association obviously, but like a very similar kind of, you know, associating the emotions and, and the feeling for the brand. But yeah, as I said, it’s, it’s really hard to. Know when you have it, One question I wanted ask about, and obviously you have a new brand director coming in who will help and stuff like this, but how, in terms of like, how do you envision setting the brand? Because it, it is so there’s obviously. Tactical important things like, like you said, it has to probably play to love. Right? It has to be approachable and probably a warmer brand than would be something else that I’m just imagining here. But like, how do you imagine as a marketer involving founders involving employees? Like how do you, how do you envision defining a brand at this stage? Cause you’re, you’re fairly early. Like, pair’s been around for how long, [00:12:29] **Gessica:** I mean one year and a half, so we are pretty new, you know, and also like, you know, the, the product changed so much in the past one year and a half. So I opened it back when I was praying. And then I opened when my daughter was three months old and it was like, Oh, my God, that’s a completely different app. And that’s, that’s what happened where you are like another stage startup. So I think right now we are still in the exploration phase. I think that the product is exactly what we wanted it to be. we know that, you know what we have works and now it’s just a matter of like, better defining the brand. How are we gonna do it? So. Well, the first thing I did is I organized, like a session, a brainstorming session with all the founders and the people that have been there from the beginning. And what I, what I did is just, I was using mural and I look for a template brand. This sounds good. Let me use this [00:13:17] **Jacob:** You’re giving away all your [00:13:19] **Gessica:** Yeah, exactly. And I just found like a super general learning session about that. It was so good for me to just get, you know, the baseline. But that’s also where I define, okay, I need someone to come in and be involved. [00:13:31] **Jacob:** Hm. [00:13:31] **Gessica:** We are really lucky that right now we are 24 people. So it’s not a lot, like even if we were to involve everyone, to be honest, it, it, like, it’s not so bad. And also I think that people knows what they are responsible for and what they can give input, but it’s someone else that will have to decide. That’s what I love about, you know, pair that is really, really fast. So how I wanted to set it up is that, I want the brand person to have a specific budget because I feel that without a budget. A brand person, you know, they’re lost, what do they do? but also I want to, for them not to have too many stakeholders involved, so you’re gonna be the founders, myself, some other key people that have been there since the beginning. And to be honest, the one that will drive the strategy is the customer. So I, I saw that recently you had a super interesting, episode and. I don’t know. I really, really loved it because you were talking with, I think Shawn, regarding the import. Yeah, exactly. Regarding the importance of listening to your customers and like how to feed, customers input to the decision that you make in terms of product, the same you are gonna do in terms of brand. So, yeah, I’m really excited to see where this is gonna take us. [00:14:43] **David:** Yeah. And speaking of understanding your customers, I think it’s one kind of undervalued aspect of. Finding marketing channel fit for your product. and it’s something I know you’ve talked about before and I wanted to dive into, you know, everybody kind of defaults to, to Facebook or, Google ads. But now, you know, there’s TikTok, there’s, there’s like a million different channels. How do you think about fitting kind of both your brand, but also, finding the right marketing channel for the right product. [00:15:19] **Gessica:** Mm-hmm . Absolutely. Yeah, it’s a really good question. I mean, to be honest, I joined bear just in, in January and, you know, there’s, there was a tremendous, tremendous growth, like comPaired to the year before. Right now, I think we grew like 30 X. We are now like at 800,000 monthly active users. So the growth was insane and. You probably are, wondering how did we do it? it’s actually through mainly Facebook at the beginning. So Facebook is still the, the go-to channel, but, I did actually a presentation long time ago, five years ago. on the importance of really diversifying your, your channel’s acquisition and even more, when you want to have performance channel. And maybe awareness channel or maybe to build this like funnel where you have like awareness and then you go with like clearly performance things. So usually what I look like, I look at the product, I look at the market fit. I look at the customers, feedback and definitely like at the potentials, scalability, difficulty, resources needed for that channel. So there’s a lot of things that goes into like considering. So for example, I would say that something like Facebook is really easy to start. You just need one person. Maybe some people to do the, the creatives and then you can start, well, if you want to do TV, not only you have to spend a lot of money, you know, on like media buying, but you need to have a strong TV spot and that is gonna cost you minimum 150 K. So that’s usually how I look, you know, at the next channel that I’m gonna, that I’m gonna explore. I tend to have like the pillars, the channels that are working, where I continue investing, like. Say massively, in this channel, usually 30% will go to like just testing new things. And in the meantime, I will expand my budget, like starting to explore new channels, knowing that for some of them it’s gonna take longer. So, when I was a Blinkist is, one of the things that I was really proud of is establishing paid content as one of the main driver. so Albany and tabula that took me and my team. I think nine months, it’s a long time. It’s like nine months of suffering and really bad performance. And people say like, are you sure you know what you’re doing? But you know, it eventually paid off. now I think Blinkist is one of the main spenders when it comes to pay content. So. Yeah, there’s a lot of things to take in consideration. And, definitely like listening to customers is number one, but also look at the resources that you have in house, look at what you need to make to successful. Look at how much time you have. you know, if, especially if you’re working with like, investors and you need to bring numbers, like, what do you need to bring back? You need to bring back. Ambitious and really like high growth. That’s one thing that you can just explore different platforms and so on. Do you need to focus on profitability? Because I mean, we’ve all seen what’s happening right now. There’s a lot of people being laying off just sold the other day, like an email from the Uber CEO. And we see in general, they’re like really turning from like extreme growth to like, Hmm. Are you profitable? How long is how long is [00:18:17] **Jacob:** SU suddenly like, C LTV balance later sound is not such a great strategy. Right? [00:18:23] **Gessica:** Exactly. Exactly. and so I think that really matters also, like, you know, what do you want to achieve and how much time do you have. [00:18:30] **David:** Yeah. And then, in kind of the next level, deeper from, from product channel fit. and, and I think you’ve talked about this before that that Blinkist is you just never were able to, to scale up on TikTok. You know, some people are like really successful on TikTok. It just like, wasn’t a good kind of product channel fit for Blinkist. But even within, you know, Facebook app versus Instagram versus other ads versus other channels, how do you think about fitting the messaging and the ads themselves to the channel? Unlike what works and what doesn’t on an ad basis versus even a channel basis. [00:19:08] **Gessica:** Yeah, that, to be honest, like it changes for every platform. Like it changes even from your own platform. So, you know, the message that you put on your website or on your app is like much different from the one that you would put in an ads, for example, what we see, like an example of what we’ve seen is that we, we do con like we do a lot of like, user testing and research with our customers to see what they love, what are the section that they love. And what is interesting is. The section or like the, the, the topics that they like in the app, they’re not the one that brought them in, you know? so that’s really interesting to see how different it is. Like it’s like, I’m driven to a certain product in an app because I think that I’m interesting in this, but then I end up using it for something else. But if I use that message in the ads, it doesn’t actually. You know, so you really need to like have a super broad approach and consider, okay, who are you talking to? which channels argue, how much time do you have to sell your product? Because if it’s a Facebook ad with, you know, just a static image, there’s not a lot of time. If it’s an influencer ad, You can tell like a long story, you can be funny. you can actually show the use case of every day. So think it really has to, to change. And then, I mean, it’s pretty clear that there’s a generational gap between different platforms. Like if I look about TikTok versus like Facebook, you know, I mean, my mom is on Facebook. I am on Instagram. My, I don’t know, my nephew is in TikTok. You know, [00:20:39] **Jacob:** Well, but I imagine for. Your target demo age, cohort’s pretty important. Like probably most people on the, in the TikTok set might not have decade long relationships. They’re trying to sustain and maintain. Right. [00:20:53] **Gessica:** Exactly. Exactly. Although, I mean, the, the fact that we are about like, having fun, especially in the relationship, you know, we are targeting actually a kind of a broad amount of. People that can be together for a year, two years, or like 10 years is really, really broad and then makes it, makes it nice. But also like there’s no way that we can use one message to rule them all and get them all interesting in the app. Really need to go deeper and understand what are the motivation. And I mean, with influencer marketing, for example, is easier because you know, the, the audience, you know, more or less how whole they are, what they’re interesting in, in other platform like Facebook, where you go with like a broad targeting. You need to go with what cells? So [00:21:34] **David:** Yeah. another thing I wanted to ask you about was, how you power all of that with data. So we’re talking about, you know, doing the user research, looking at yeah. And, and you’re kind of in a unique position right now having just joined, Paired. And I imagine there wasn’t a ton of infrastructure before you got there and then with your computer science background. So how, how have you been thinking about building out a data platform to understand, like you talked about a few minutes ago, how. You know, messaging, toward one feature actually brings them in, but then they’re gonna get hooked on another feature. How do you know that? And then how do you, how do you measure that? How do you perform against that and how do you build out a data pipeline to, to continually measure those sorts of things? [00:22:23] **Gessica:** Of course that’s my favorite topic. [00:22:27] **Jacob:** Again, I think one thing Blinkist did really well, like from my understanding of the company is that, that was, you think it’s a, it’s a small audiobook company and yes, it. But also like it’s really a performance marketing machine that they figured out, right. Like that. And that’s true for a lot of companies that do well in what we do. Right. for, for better or worse. a lot of the bigger ones it’s they, they figured out a product, but then the second part is figuring out that, that, that channel unlock. So sorry, please. [00:22:51] **Gessica:** Absolutely. And I think it’s also so interesting to see, because when I joined, Blinkist, it was like, as I say, around seven years ago, and we were also like 30 people. So their, their data infrastructure was, yeah, there was no data infrastructure. You know, we were at the beginning, we were still using a lot of spreadsheet, but I think since the beginning, there was a strong, willingness to build everything in. While, you know, seven years later, I’m joining Paired and I see that their approach is completely different. And a lot of time it’s like, you know, why would we build something in house when there’s a service like revenue card, for example, they could do that for you, you know? I, I think it’s completely different. So I found myself building a completely different type of right. Data infrastructure, and I did it twice. So that’s, that’s really exciting to see the differences. For me having data it’s super important right now. you, we, since we are using a lot of tools, like external tools, the risk is that all this knowledge is distributed across like three or four different platforms, but then there’s no way to, to bring them together. And I think to be honest, That’s the issue that I’m facing right now. So we are working, we have a project. We made a already like a lot of improvements on like bringing everything in house and then understanding, okay, what is that we need? Because when I joined, we’re still using, you know, Google spreadsheet. That’s how you start. Yeah. That’s the difference that I see, I think before it was more like build everything in house, do everything manually have a team that will like take care of like maintaining API access and so on and so forth and right. Now’s more like, okay, distribute, use a lot of tools, but then also bring back in house and have a strong visualization tool that will allow us to go deeper on the funnel from like the moment that they see the ad once to, you know, downloading and then using the app and doing analysis on the behavior. So that’s usually, you know, I follow. The entire funnel for that? yeah, it’s pretty, pretty exciting. [00:24:46] **David:** What, what’s the current stack for? Paired. I know you’ll use revenue CAD. Do you use, amplitude? You use an MMP? Like what, what’s the stack? And, and where, how do you see that evolving as you grow? [00:24:58] **Gessica:** Listen, then I want the money from all this, you know, tools that I’m using, because if I have to mention them NOLA, I’m joking. I’m joking. I, so at the moment we’re using MMP, that is just, we are using, of course cat. we are also using amplitude. right now we’re looking for a tool to download, or marketing data. There are a couple of options, out there. I think five trend is probably the. the most common one. but we’re still trying to define bringing all the data in, you know, in-house and snowflake, and then, visualizing, visualizing the data through, locker. So this is the setup that we have right now, in the past I’ve been using, I don’t know how to pronounce it C sense or sizes. It was Periscope data before, but it was also really strong in terms of visualization, but I found the lockers like next step. [00:25:52] **Jacob:** It’s it’s interesting this, you talk about the, and I, I actually was introduced to Toby. He was one of the founders of Blinkist years ago. as he, he found us organically, this would’ve maybe been 20, 20. Before we had raised our series a and all this stuff. And he had, he was like, oh my God, like, we have solved this internally. This is such a nightmare. You know, he told the story of your, your journey internally of having to build all this stuff in house. And yeah, here we are five years later for, for like maybe longer, like, okay. Yeah. Now you can’t have tools, but this like last step still. Of okay. I have like these vendors for, you know, my behavioral data, my acquisition data and my, my, my subscription data. And we still have to merge them. Right. And you know, from what I’ve heard, this is a very, it’s a very common pattern. It’s what we do internally. Right. We, we use lots of different vendors for our, for our analytics. And then we pull it all together in, in a data warehouse for customization, and things like that. But that’s a much better. Game, because like, by the time it gets to snowflake, you’re just writing sequel queries and gluing stuff together. You’re not like, you’re not like , especially when you involve something like five train, I think is a great tool as well for just handling some of the like data schlepping and things like this. But, I wonder if that will further become compressed at some point, we’ll have this podcast again in five years and see if like there’s now like a, a meta super platform and maybe it’s RevenueCat. I don’t know. we’ll see [00:27:17] **Gessica:** Yeah, I, I love to do that. And I think also right now, as a matter of like, there’s so many also competitors coming up from all these like different parts, you know, that you need to, to bring together. So it’s really, really hard to make even a decision, like looking about, you know, the marketing API, for example. Oh, my God. There’s so much out there. but then when you go deeper, you see that the main players are like always up to date to the changes on API. they’re more reliable. They have a stronger customer support. They also cost double, but you worth [00:27:44] **Jacob:** So this is, my naivete. Can, can you tell me what a marketing API is like? [00:27:48] **Gessica:** Oh, so connecting. so for, for example, sorry, connecting to, Facebook to [00:27:53] **Jacob:** Okay [00:27:55] **Gessica:** Or to our brain download data. [00:27:57] **Jacob:** You don’t have [00:27:58] **Gessica:** To. [00:27:59] **Jacob:** Connect to each like platform individually. [00:28:01] **Gessica:** I call it marketing API, but maybe it has like a different name. So, yeah. [00:28:04] **Jacob:** Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. It’s aggregating these, like, especially, I mean, similar level to what we do, right. Which is aggregate disparate data sources and try to normalize it right. [00:28:13] **Gessica:** Exactly, exactly. And, I think also regarding data, there’s something interesting about automation that I think it’s also. Changing a little bit. Like if I look at my experience before, I remember, you know, spending a lot of time with my, with the team building automation rules, for example, for, for our brain. And right now, all the things that, you know, we develop, they are actually within the platform. So you don’t need to do anything it’s already done. And I think we are moving more and more in that direction. right now, I don’t know if it makes sense to use, like, you know, an automation tool, even for Facebook ads, the only things where you need help is actually the uploading of creatives. That is like a nightmare, but still, you know, everything else is kind of done with the script and that’s it, or is already like, developed within the interface that you’re using, being that the Facebook business manager or whatever. So it’s really interesting to see how the marketing platforms are evolving and yeah, that’s, that’s good for us. [00:29:13] **David:** You learn, learn something new every day. So we, I haven’t talked as. In depth with somebody at that, at that level of, building out your own data warehouse and visualizing in snowflake and, yeah, there’s a lot to it. And, it it’s cool that you kind of brought a lot of that experience from Paired to such an early stage. I mean, sorry, from blin, having spent so many years building all that out. And then, like you said, pair is very, very smart to hire somebody like you early and bring all of that knowledge and [00:29:45] **Jacob:** Oh [00:29:45] **David:** It out internally [00:29:47] **Jacob:** Why the game gets harder and harder too, because like or pioneers, like Blinkist us, figure it out. And then those people go. And now that, that becomes the bar, right. to, to compete in the, in the, for the next generation of apps. Right. but we also have, like you were saying, like the automation getting pushed down to the platforms, that’s a field level. Because now more apps have access to that. It’s baked into the platforms, and things like that. So, but, and then the end result ideally is better targeting, matching, and better apps because you’re spending less company resources spinning up internal, you know, you’ll do a lot of work to get the Looker. Snowflake set up going, but then it will, that’s not a huge, huge lift. and you’ll be able to like spend more time, like, Hey, like going back to the stuff we talked to the beginning of the call, which is brand , you know, like awareness, like the things that you actually get into marketing to do. [00:30:38] **Gessica:** Exactly. [00:30:39] **Jacob:** Reach people and, and, and spread the word about a, you know, a good service. [00:30:42] **Gessica:** Exactly. And I think that’s the risk of like going too much into the data side, that sometimes you have access to so much data that you can get lost. I remember spending hours and hours looking at like going deeper and deeper and deeper until at some point you lose significance. And so the data you’re looking at means literally nothing. So I think is always good to have a good balance between like going into details, but also think about the overall business. and you know, what your, what you want to achieve. [00:31:08] **David:** Yeah, I know the two of you could, nerd out on this for another 30 minutes. [00:31:13] **Jacob:** Where I like am uniquely passionate about. [00:31:16] **David:** Yeah, but I, we are getting short on time and there there’s something I really wanted to talk to you about. So you and, Andy from feature the co-founder of, of feature. Do a podcast, mobile growth nightmares, and I freaking love this podcast. I’m a huge fan. and one of the things I love and I talk about it on this podcast quite a bit, probably to a fault, but it really is just so true that you learn as much from. Fuckups as y’all call it on the, mobile growth nightmares as you do from the successes, but most people only want to talk about the successes. So it’s, it’s amazing that you have a whole podcast dedicated to, to screwing up and learning from it. And then talking, you know, being honest about having screwed up and some of them are like, Hey, we, we wasted $200,000 because of a bug or, you know, some misconfiguration or whatever. And that’s a big thing to. Own, but then also to realize, Hey, that’s, that’s a learning experience and it’s just, it happens like when you’re spending that much money, you’re gonna screw up and waste some of it. so anyways, that kind of quick overview and plug for your podcast there, but, I did want to talk through some of your favorite and some of the more interesting. Screwups from, from the podcast. So one of the ones I thought was especially interesting was ACC Clement in his cease and assist. Can you give us [00:32:35] **Gessica:** Mm-hmm [00:32:35] **David:** Quick story on that? [00:32:36] **Gessica:** Oh my God. Yes. I mean, also it’s I kind of like, it happened to me as well somehow because we were working together. So Cleon, he was like the, head of paid social at Blinkist. so he was in my team, and we were taking care of, you know, paid acquisition and at some point we found. An amazing article plus ads that work, it was like something about Bill Gates and you know, and the reading list of Bill Gates. It was insane. Oh my God. It worked so perfectly. And we were like clapping each other. Yeah. Good job. We found the one. And then I think after maybe a couple of weeks, or maybe no, maybe a month. I don’t remember. yeah, we receive, not from Bill Gates, but from someone pretty close to him, they say like, you need. Just bring it down and stop running. And that was like such a nightmare because at that moment, since it was working, so. You know, all these ads were pointing like we were using this creative. And so as soon as we removed the ad, the account went from spending, I don’t know, a hundred to spending 10. And so of course there were not enough events. Yeah. It was a disaster. Like the entire channel fell down and also the same creative was used across multiple channel. So we had to take this, you know, everywhere. So that was like, that was a disaster. don’t use famous names or if you use it, maybe not too much, not too [00:33:54] **Jacob:** Yeah, I was gonna say, I actually would be interesting to know what the, what the actual case law on that would be. Right. Because it’s not like you were saying Bill Gates, endorses, Blinkist. Right. You were. Spreading news about a public figure. Right? You might have been in the clear, as a small startup, you can’t afford to figure that out. Right. You’re just like, [00:34:13] **Gessica:** I exactly looking at [00:34:14] **Jacob:** Try something else. [00:34:15] **Gessica:** The lawsuit. I’m like, I’m gonna stay from that [00:34:20] **Jacob:** True. Like Lucas is a German company, right? So like, wait, where’s your standing bill? I don’t know but, but yeah, again, like you’re just like cease and desist. Okay. Like what [00:34:29] **David:** Yeah, [00:34:30] **Gessica:** Exactly. [00:34:31] **David:** But, but it, and it seemed like another great lesson from that one too, was to, to not put too many eggs in one basket. Right. It’s like, [00:34:38] **Gessica:** Yeah. [00:34:38] **David:** This one, that’s performing so well to, continue to maintain diversity of, of ads and, and budget, right. [00:34:44] **Gessica:** Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think, that’s what I’m doing right now. Not only diversifying the channels, but really diversify the messages as well, like make sure that you have at least like four, five creatives that are working at the same time. something happen, you know, you have like a backup plan. [00:34:59] **David:** Yeah. All right. And so then another good story. And this is, so this podcast hasn’t come out yet, so I haven’t been able to listen to it. but it will be out before, before we release, our podcast, the sub club podcast with you on it. but there’s a story with the fantastic app. that’s gonna [00:35:16] **Gessica:** Yeah. [00:35:17] **David:** Mobile growth nightmare. So, so tell us about that one. [00:35:19] **Gessica:** Yeah, it was like, so it was actually a live recording that we did at the AZA conference in Berlin two or three weeks ago. Yeah. It was really nice just to see people, you know, in real life it was amazing. And we invited, Lucas Stephani that is leading Grahl at Adidas. Fantastic. And if you haven’t heard of that is like, is an app for, for running. It was pretty famous and it was just called fantastic. But then it was a choir. By Adidas. And he was telling these like super interesting stories about the fact that when it was acquired, you know, Adidas, Adidas, actually that is better Adidas, is such a big name. So of course they wanted to change it. Right. to change the name, to represent that. But then, what happened is that suddenly since it was like a really well known platform, they lost like so much when they changed the name, they lost so much organic, organic discoverability. People were looking for that and they. Finding. And at the same time, there was such a big drop in conversion because all these people that were looking for Adidas shoes on the app store, I dunno why you will do that. But they were doing that. They will arrive download the app. And then they would say like, wait a moment. Where is the shoes that I wanted to buy? So the conversion rate dropped as well. This means that all the ads campaign and everything that was depending on the vents, kind of, you know, went to boo and, yeah, it was like a super disaster. And you took the month to really recover. And it’s something that probably. you know, they should have thought about it. I think there were some discussion, but they didn’t imagine the impact to be so big. So it’s so interesting because you will feel like, yeah, of course I’m gonna use this username in the app store makes a lot of sense, but yeah, you need to be careful to what you wish for gonna have a lot of installs, but. [00:36:59] **David:** It kind of takes us all the way back around to our first part of the conversation. The Adidas brand is about buying shoes, and the Runtastic brand was about tracking your running. So when they switched the branding it switched the expectations of people coming into the app. [00:37:16] **Gessica:** Yeah. [00:37:17] **David:** So, yeah, that’s so interesting. [00:37:20] **Gessica:** So hopefully, hopefully the episodes will be out really soon. Let’s see. I’ll ask Andy to work on that. [00:37:28] **David:** Nice. Well, we are running out of time. I wish we could talk to you for another hour, because this has been amazing, and there’s so much more that you’ve learned over the years that you could share. So we’ll have to have you back on again some time. But as we’re wrapping up, are you you hiring at Paired, or is there anything else you want to say as we wrap up? [00:37:45] **Gessica:** Yeah, we are hiring a lot of people. So please have a look at the website, www.Paired.com. We are hiring a bunch of new people. We don’t want to grow too much, but we have some key positions that we are looking for. So please check it out. And in general I’m really excited to see where this company is growing. I believe a hundred percent in what we’re doing. If you want to have a chat I’m always available for learning exchange. You can find me on LinkedIn, and you can see my podcast that comes out every six months because we are not as good as you guys. [00:38:19] **David:** Alright. Thank you so much, Gessica, for being on the podcast. It was so fun talking to you.