Awesome People - Ep 109
full-stack marketing teams + quantitative vs. qualitative decision making + Guinness Book of World Records
Hi founders and fellow VC Friends!
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Please meet Seth Lasser, your full-stack marketing expert 😎
I met Seth via Danny Shapiro (an awesome people OG) two years ago. We’ve kept in touch, and Seth is finally ready to take on more clients. Seth started an embedded marketing agency, Lantern. They provide embedded, full-stack marketing teams for early-stage consumer internet and digital health brands. Over the course of his career, he has led the marketing launches of more than a dozen DTC and Digital Health brands. He’s helped companies across health and wellness, financial services, e-commerce, and real estate grow from launch to over $100mm in revenue.
In his spare time, Seth is a competitive home chef with a pending record for most meatballs cooked in an hour (let him know if you know anyone at the Guinness Book of World Records 🤩).
He's trusted by Keeps, Doctor on Demand, BetterHealth, Sequence (acquired by Weight Watchers), 1800flowers, and many tier-one early-stage investors and founders.
You can hire him to:
build a strong strategic marketing foundation, including developing brand messaging, creating a marketing website, and creating a go-to-market strategy
execute a complete DTC or B2B growth plan, including paid and organic media, optimizing the website, and implementing email and lifecycle marketing
Want an intro to Seth? Respond to this email, and I’ll connect you!
Seth was gracious enough to share tips with us here ✨
Your marketing focus needs to span the full funnel.
The days of your marketing team spending 100% of their time on top-of-funnel improvements — think new channels, and creative options — are over. It’s time to go back to the basics. In fact, there’s probably more leverage in the mid-funnel initiatives, like on-site optimizations, or bottom-funnel initiatives, like email and retention, than at the top of the funnel.
We all know that any site-conversion improvements improve CAC 1:1. If you increase conversion by 25%, you decrease CAC by 25%. What a lot of early-stage companies don’t realize is how much improvement there can be in early tests when nothing has been optimized. At Sequence, simply by changing button copy from a generic ‘Join Sequence’ to ‘Do I Qualify?’ increased the conversion rate by more than 30%. Not every experiment will work, (showing pensive patient images didn’t convert better than relieved patients for a mental health provider), but capture those low-hanging fruits!
At the same time, you can’t test everything, so you need to know where to lead with conviction and where to capture quantitative data.
If I had a dollar for every founder who proposed figuring out brand messaging by running competing Instagram ads…
There are two issues with delegating all decisions to statistical results.
First, Meta, Google, and TikTok will find the right audience for your value proposition— it just might not be the right consumer for your brand long term. The reason? Today, most successful paid social campaigns target a broad audience, e.g. adults 25-40 with top 50% household income. If you have high-quality creative, the platforms will find a sub-segment within that broad audience that engages with your ads and makes a purchase. However, that may not be the right consumer for your brand long term.
For example, a client's initial creative for personalized supplements resonated with sedentary and inactive consumers more than “health optimizers.” These early cohorts had low retention. We changed the creative and messaging to shift our audience. These subsequent “health optimizer” cohorts stuck with the product. Had we relied on Meta to teach us who our audience was, we would have taken the wrong path.
Second, you simply do not have enough data in the early stages to test everything. Your traffic levels are low. You need to pick your battles on things that will really move the needle — one way or another. Test two completely different funnels. For example, at Keeps, we tested having consumers choose their product first vs. starting with the medical intake. The medical intake dramatically improved conversion. Slight variations in your “Supporting benefits” section below the fold won’t have a measurable impact until you’re at scale. Listen to your low-volume early consumer feedback and implement those changes. With small amounts of data, you must be extremely thoughtful about which things you test — the art of growth vs. the hard statistical science.
For B2B2C companies, even if consumers aren’t paying for your product, they’re still deciding whether or not to use it. Building consumer DNA into your communication and product is critical.
Let’s assume you’re the CEO of a digital health company, like a telemedicine or mental health product. You rely on health plans to pay for the service. While consumers don’t pay directly, the long-term success of your product is still judged based on consumer usage. You must create a compelling service to and clearly communicate the benefits to consumers. Consumers need to understand the differences between your service and others.
Once you create partnerships with health plans and employers, you still need to own patient communication. Run digital campaigns to tell potential patients you’re covered by United Healthcare. Create turnkey marketing materials for employers to distribute to their workforce. Work with your health plan partners to send old-fashioned postcards to members announcing availability of a new service.
Unfortunately health plan or employer coverage doesn’t guarantee utilization. Once those deals are signed, the work of generating demand is really just beginning. This is true for any B2B2C company. You must own consumer communication and build with the consumer in mind.
Want an intro to Seth? Respond to this email, and I’ll connect you!
As always, please let me know if you have any questions and if you want an intro to Seth!
Stay awesome,
Founder of Awesome People Ventures & Talent
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Awesome People Continued 🤩
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Lauren, our Fractional GTM Leader — recently founded Indigo, a go-to-market agency. She builds marketing, community, and sales functions from the ground up. You can hire her to work on brand development and positioning, full-funnel, marketing, sales & partnerships and community strategy.
Brooke, Your Creative Brand Genius — creative directed and wrote award-winning campaigns at companies like Google, Amazon, R/GA, and Digitas. Today, she runs her own creative studio, Baubo, that helps brands find their souls and launch them. You can hire her to help you with brand strategy, naming, verbal identity and copywriting, visual identity and design, packaging, website creation, and campaigns.
Jeremy, Your Freelance Product Designer — helped 20+ startups establish design systems, ship beloved products, and raise capital with clear, concise, and beautiful pitch decks. Before consulting, he led design for Square’s Invoices, Appointments, and Virtual Terminal products — tools millions of small business owners use.
Want an intro to Seth, Lauren, Brooke, or Jeremy? Respond to this email, and I’ll connect you!