In this episode of Never Too Early, host Lauren Ipsen from Decibel interviews growth advisor Yuriy Timen, former global head of marketing and growth at Grammarly. They discuss actionable insights for founders on topics such as establishing a growth engine, balancing growth with profitability, the importance of leaning into organic growth before paid channels, and when to bring in fractional advisors while also touching on his professional journey and a unique personal anecdote. The episode provides valuable advice for early-stage founders looking to scale their organizations effectively.
00:00 Introduction to Never Too Early
00:19 Meet Yuriy Timen: Growth Expert
01:38 Question 1: How do I find my growth engine as a founder? Yuriy emphasizes the importance of exploring product-led growth, SEO, and natural virality before experimenting with paid growth levers.
06:02 Question 2: How do I vet new growth opportunities? Yuriy shares his systematic approach to vetting growth opportunities and optimizing new channels.
09:39 Question 3: How do I balance growth and bottom line? Lauren and Yuriy talk about the importance of aligning with your board on your growth strategy.
12:25 Question 4: What are some examples of different growth tactics that may have worked for one company but not another? Yuriy talks about his personal experience working at Grammarly in the early days and shares insights on a new company he’s advising that provides real-time feedback on your Zoom conversations.
17:09 Question 5: When would you advise a founder to use a fractional growth advisor versus hiring someone in a full time growth position? Lauren and Yuriy discuss how fractional leaders can be the best way to more deeply understand who you want to hire in a full time capacity.
20:53 Conclusion and Final Thoughts.
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Transcript
LAUREN IPSEN: Welcome to Never Too Early, a YouTube series focused on unconventional talent insights for founders. I'm Lauren Ipsen, Talent Partner at Decibel. In each episode, we'll cover the top five commonly asked questions that we get from founders building their organizations for the very first time. It's never too early to learn from the best.
I'm super excited to introduce my guest today, Yuriy Timen. Yuriy was the global head of marketing and growth at Grammarly and is now a full-time growth advisor, having worked with more than 30 tech companies in the past four years, including Canva, Airtable, Whimsical, Otter AI, Oyster, Flow Health, and many, many more. He's also been an incredibly helpful growth advisor and friend to the Decibel portfolio.
So I'm very excited to welcome my guest, Yuriy, to the show. All right. Thank you for being on the show.
YURIY TIMEN: Of course. Thanks for having me.
LAUREN IPSEN: My pleasure. So I'm super excited to have you here and talk about all things growth. I just gave an overview of your incredibly impressive professional background, but it would be super helpful if you could give the listeners something fun about you.
YURIY TIMEN: Okay. So here's one that no one saw coming. I was a competitive ballroom dancer growing up, to the point where I represented the United States at the Youth World Championships held in Moscow, Russia.
LAUREN IPSEN: Oh my God!
YURIY TIMEN: That’s – yeah, let's go with that.
LAUREN IPSEN: That's incredibly fun. That's a really good one. Yeah. I don't know if you can beat that with anything else.
YURIY TIMEN: Just putting it out there. Okay.
LAUREN IPSEN: Okay, so let's talk about growth and the five most commonly asked questions that I get from founders that are scaling their organizations for the very first time. We'll start with the first question that I get, which is: How do I find my growth engine as a founder?
YURIY TIMEN: What I like to tell founders is start by figuring out which way the current is flowing or the currents – maybe every current representing a growth hypothesis or a growth channel, and try to swim with the current as opposed to against the current. So, you know, I think every founder should first start with understanding the potential that they have for growing organically, right?
Like, you can turn to paid down the line, but you have to already be generating revenue. You have to understand your LTVs. You have to understand your payback periods if you want to get paid effectively, right? And there's nothing wrong with paid. I actually come from a paid background, a performance marketing background and foundation, but always start – start with organic.
And really, there are two, I would say, or let's call it three, but really two kind of direct response, organic growth levers that you can pull. One of them is around product-led growth, like can you generate enough word of mouth, enough kind of viral loops, sharing behavior, or what's traditionally called product-led growth. And the other one is SEO. And I think that there is almost like a checklist type of exercise that you can do with figuring out if your product is a good fit for either product virality and/or for SEO.
Maybe I won't go into those checklists in this session. But I think you absolutely got to start there, because if your product has an inherent network effect or it's inherently viral – I don't know, think Spotify, for instance, right? Or Riverside, even, you know, to bring it closer to home where, okay, you have a podcast. I'm a guest. If I ever want to start my own podcast, right, there is a viral loop right there. So it should be easy for me at the end of this call – I'm sorry. At the end of this recording it should be easy for me to be like, oh, this is how I create my own account and become a podcast host myself.
So if your product lends itself naturally to virality, lean into it. Lean into it heavily, right? Because that is a rare advantage, right? I've worked with a lot of products that have tried to manufacture virality. That's very difficult to do if your product is not inherently viral. For instance, Grammarly in the early days, it wasn't an inherently viral product.
It's like, editing your writing was largely a solo pursuit. It wasn't a collaborative activity. So there wasn't an easy way to kind of, you know, build in share loops. And then SEO, you can also run through a checklist and be like, hey, the stuff that I'm building, the needs that I'm meeting, what are the keyword universes around those needs? What are people searching for?
Is there a high volume? High volume, high intent, low competition. Are there intersections of those three where I can really make a mark in building my SEO engine, SEO program. I always start with assessing that when it comes to growth engine because those are things that are – you know, paid, it's almost like – hot take alert.
But paid is like, almost anyone can force their way into it, right? Regardless, yeah, you have to have decent LTVs, but SEO compatibility, product-led growth, viral loop compatibility, that's oftentimes inherent to what you're building. So start there by seeing if there is, you know, a strong product channel fit.
LAUREN IPSEN: Cool. Awesome. As a founder, how do I vet growth opportunities, new channels, new lanes of optimization?
YURIY TIMEN: The first principle that I think applies universally is you got to take a hypothesis-driven approach. So you're going to have ideas around different growth bets that you want to take. First of all, find a way to systematically prioritize and force strength those. It's going to be part science, part art, because you're going to have to make assumptions, like, you know, common frameworks, like the ICE framework or the RICE framework, right? Standing for Reach, Impact, Certainty or Confidence, and Effort.
Do something like that. It's less important that you score every idea accurately, because you won't. You won't score with precision. But it's important that you build the muscle of just, you know, not, jumping on the newest idea or the idea that may be the most charismatic person pitch, right?
That's not how ideas should rise above other ideas that you want to test, right? So, yeah, you have a great idea, and you pitched it very eloquently. Okay, it goes in the backlog. It gets scored, right? And then the things that rise to the top and everything in that backlog needs to have a strong hypothesis tied to it. So everybody who's putting ideas in your backlog, they should be held to that standard where an idea is not an idea until you describe the underlying hypothesis on why you think it should work. Okay?
So that's a universal principle using the hypothesis-driven approach. After that, I think with a lot of growth levers or tactics where founders struggle is defining what is the minimum viable test that I need to run to know if this channel or tactic is working or not.
And that test needs to be – when I say minimal viable test, it needs to be defined not just in terms of the budget that you need to put against a given tactic or idea, but also, it needs to have a little bit of a statistical or data science approach to it, where you say, okay, how much traffic or how many leads do I need to generate to be able to measure down funnel performance and be able to say definitively, does this channel work or does it not work for me?
It's important to have your success metrics well-defined. So the channel that you're pursuing or the tactic that you're pursuing, you have to be knowledgeable about what type of maybe KPI you need to be focused on. Like, for instance, if you're focusing on driving purchases or software subscriptions, you should probably be prioritizing more bottom funnel or demand capture channels, right?
So think like SEM, or maybe some really highly relevant display. If you care about generating just more traffic or driving up awareness, then you should be looking at channels and tactics that are more conducive to that goal, right? So that may be more like upper funnel, your demand generation channels, like YouTube or influencers and the like.
LAUREN IPSEN: Cool. How do you personally advise founders to balance growth and trying new channels, and figuring out how to optimize what they've got, and then bottom line?
YURIY TIMEN: Great question. So I have my biases, like anyone, right? And they are largely informed by where I grew up, where I came of age, which is Grammarly. And Grammarly, as you very well know, given our longstanding relationship there, Grammarly was bootstrapped for the first seven years of its existence, which meant that Grammarly was profitable. That's the only way you can bootstrap a business, right, for that long.
And that became part of Grammarly's DNA, being able to balance growth with bottom line and profitability. It was not a choice. It was a necessity when you bootstrap, right? And even after Grammarly went on to raise one funding round after another, that quality of its DNA has never gone away, right?
Like, it was already built in. So that's my bias. My bias is, a company should always be trying to get to default alive as quickly as possible, right? To break even as quickly as possible and then invest in growth commensurately with its kind of margins and its profitability.
That's my bias, but I recognize that's not always the case, because sometimes, especially in nascent markets, you have to move quickly. And that means, you know, if you're focusing on profitability, you're not going to be able to win market share and you may lose to competition.
So the first thing that I do with founders when helping them strike that balance is I ask – because most of them are going to be venture-backed companies. So I always say, what is your understanding, what is your consensus with your board on how you should be approaching balancing growth? Because whatever advice I give you, I want it to be complementary to your social contract with your board on how you should be balancing the two.
And if the answer is, we don't have one, or it's unclear, or they are stumbling their way through kind of describing how their board is advising them on balancing the two, then I say, okay. I'm like, you have some work to do.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.
YURIY TIMEN: Right? Go to your board. Align there first.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. Cool. What are some growth tactics that you have found that have maybe worked for one early stage company, but not another? So maybe they've raised the same amount of funding, but they're – they come from different – they're in different sectors or different primary focuses. Talk to me a little bit about how you kind of work through some of that.
YURIY TIMEN: Well, you know, I'll go back to an earlier question that you asked, which is how do I figure out my kind of growth engine or growth levers? So, you know, I talked about kind of product virality and building viral loops. I talked about SEO. Well, there are some products that are going to lend themselves more naturally to those channels and not others.
I don't know – let's run through a few of them. A few of the companies that I've worked with, right? So, for instance, uh, Airtable or Canva, right? Both former clients of mine. Obviously lend themselves extremely well to, actually, both PLG motion and an SEO motion. So, on the PLG front, they both – they're both collaborative tools, right?
In the case of Canva, there is a creator of designs, there is a reviewer of designs, there is an approver of designs, right? So, collaborative. And so that's an opportunity to invite, create
different user tiers, permissions, etc., right? Airtable is similar. There are creators of bases, reviewers of bases, commenters, etc. So, again, an opportunity to build in all those viral loops.
On the SEO front, Canva, you know, people search for all type of long tail, design or graphic searches, right? I don't know, like same sex wedding invitation, Hawaii theme. You know what I mean? And that is like – and they’re – and Canva will be there with their long tail programmatic SEO page, right? So SEO worked really well.
You contrast that with an emerging category or a category creator. I don't know. Let me think of someone. Okay, I got one. There's a company I work with called Poised, which was basically like a Grammarly for audio and video communication, right? So it's kind of like, imagine we're talking here, and I have a little overlay that's giving me a real time feedback, like, hey Yuri, you're talking too much. Let Lauren talk.
LAUREN IPSEN: Oh, that would stress me out.
YURIY TIMEN: Yeah. I mean, there are some – the UI was tricky.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.
YURIY TIMEN: The UX was tricky.
LAUREN IPSEN: I feel like it would tell me to, like, lower the octave of my laugh.
YURIY TIMEN: It probably would. But, no, no, no. I didn't mean it like – no, I love your laugh. I just mean, they did –
LAUREN IPSEN: We’re actually ending the episode now. I'm just kidding.
YURIY TIMEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They did get pretty sophisticated with tone, intonation, nonverbal cues. They would be – but anyways, that was a complete category creator. And so there wasn't as obvious of an opportunity to lean on SEO because it's like, what are people searching for?
Are people searching for a real time Zoom communication coach? No, right? So that's an example of product that didn't lend itself to the same channel.
LAUREN IPSEN: Right.
YURIY TIMEN: On the performance marketing front, it's pretty easy for me to come in. I can, in 15 minutes – if they have all their data, in 15 minutes, I can help them figure out if they should go heavy into performance marketing or not. I ask, like, five questions. Like what's the conversion rate from website visit to, you know, sign-up? What's the conversion rate from sign-up to purchase? What is your average order value on your purchase? What is
your projected LTV? What is your split between your monthly subscribers and annual subscribers?
I have a little checklist that I go through, and based on the answers, I can be like, yeah, you know what? You can find a lot of success in the following performance marketing channels. Go after them. Or it's like, hey, you know, you're not up to par on the following metrics. Bring the conversion rate up to here, get your average order value up to here. Then you can – then you should be testing performance marketing.
So there'll be some companies, some founders I work with, well, they already have the right sort of ingredients, the right inputs. And I'll say, hey, you should absolutely be leaning into paid. And there'll be others where I’ll say, no, you got work to do.
LAUREN IPSEN: Talk to me a little bit about where you feel like it makes more sense to have someone like yourself come in in a fractional or advisory capacity as opposed to having someone come in a full-time way?
YURIY TIMEN: Yeah. So I would say some of the biggest reasons you may want to bring on fractional as opposed to hiring someone full-time – okay. Number one, this is focusing on me. You want access to a certain caliber of talent that you don't think you either can recruit full-time right now or have the surrounding resources to actually make use of them.
I'll oftentimes come in doing half a day a week with a Series A company, where they wouldn't know what to do with a hundred percent of my – of me, because of how much leverage I would be trying to create. And they wouldn't have the engine resources, the design resources, the anything resources, right?
So that's one rationale for hiring fractional. You want access to a certain caliber of talent, but you just don't think that you need or can make use of the full-time equivalent of that caliber of talent. Okay?
Number two. You need – you want – you think you need somebody in a certain role, but you're not confident what is the exact profile of the person you need to hire, and you need help figuring out that profile. You bring on someone fractional like me, not only am I helping you stand up a function or take the function to the next level, I'm helping you calibrate on who you need to hire in my place as your full-time hire.
And sometimes in my case, I actually will help you make that hire, right? So it's sort of this idea of, like, I don't know – I don't know exactly who I need in this role. So if I'm a founder who never hired ahead of growth, how do I know what to look for, right?
And – okay. Three, you don't know if this competency or channel is going to work for your product. Let's take affiliate marketing, for instance, right? I think it could work. How do I test that channel effectively?
Well, I have three options to test that channel effectively. Number one, get someone on my team already today, who probably doesn't know the channel, but maybe they're tangentially related, and be like, hey, so-and-so, take a stab at this channel. Could work, but usually, if you're dealing with that kind of situation, chances are, the person you're asking is already wearing a hundred hats, and you're trying to, throw on a hundred and first hat on them, right?
LAUREN IPSEN: Yes.
YURIY TIMEN: So it may not work. Second option, go and hire full-time. Be like, okay, I think affiliates could work. We're hiring an affiliate marketing manager. You have to take the channel from zero to one. We have – okay, high-risk, right?
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.
YURIY TIMEN: You're going to spend a lot of time looking for this person, and you haven't even validated the channel. This is where fractional comes in. Why not hire someone who knows the affiliate channel well, who could spend a day, two days a week? You know, you're not committing to long-term employment. You don't have the same level of, I don't know, responsibility or accountability before this person. And see if they can take this channel zero to one, prove it out, and strengthen your conviction that it is indeed a long-term channel that you want to hire full-time for.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. Super helpful. I think all of this is going to be incredibly beneficial to our founders, so I can't thank you enough for joining and being on the show.
YURIY TIMEN: I love talking to founders, helping founders. For every one founder I work with, there's probably ten that I'm just friends with and helping out – helping out on a kind of casual, pro bono basis.
So, you know, I invite the founders that are listening to this to reach out to me. I will do my best to respond to everyone. And hopefully, you know, maybe even spend some time with some of the folks and help them kind of unlock new horizons in their businesses.
LAUREN IPSEN: Amazing. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for joining. And thank you all for listening to Never Too Early. More to come soon.
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