[00:00:00] Yuriy Timen: The biggest bang for your buck on maximizing retention and minimizing churn comes from things you do in the first user session or call it the first week, somewhat product dependent. That's where you're going to get probably 80% of the return.

[00:00:31] Andrew Michael: This is Churn.FM, the podcast for subscription economy pros. Each week we hear how the world's fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth.

[00:00:43] VO: How do you build a habit-forming product? We crossed over that magic threshold to negative churn. You need to invest in customer success. It always comes down to retention and engagement. Completely boosts the strategy, profitable and growing.

[00:00:56] Andrew Michael: Strategies, tactics and ideas brought together to help your business thrive in the subscription economy. I'm your host, Andrew Michael, and here's today's episode.

[00:01:07] Andrew Michael: Hey, Yuri, welcome to the show.

[00:01:09] Yuriy Timen: Thanks for having me, Andrew.

[00:01:11] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you. For the listeners, Yuri is an investor and advisor to companies like Airtable, Canva, Oyster, Whimsical and more. Prior to starting his advising career, Yuri was the global head of marketing and growth at Grammarly where he joined as employee number 10 and saw the company scale to over 450 team members, 30 million daily actives while growing profitably and raising over $200 million. You also led a team of 40 people before leaving during his time there. So my first question for you today then is what are your thoughts on the recent merger between Grammarly and Coda?

[00:01:46] Yuriy Timen: Ooh, that's a good one. Actually, it's the first time I'm being asked that in a somewhat public setting. So I, first, a few points of disclosure. I am still close with a lot of folks, Grammarly and have been having conversations since the merger to kind of understand the vision, et cetera. And it's not very clear in my mind what, like it's not easy to distinguish between what's already been publicly announced and what's been shared in private conversations. So I'm going to tread a little bit carefully here.

[00:02:21] Yuriy Timen: I mean, net net, I'm stoked. I'm stoked because I feel like Grammarly has had phenomenal success in the AI writing assistance space. But for the last maybe year, there's been so much, there's been a frenzy of activity and innovation in AI and large language models, you know, and democratization of access to AI tools that Grammarly, I imagine, because I'm not part of these conversations day to day, has been searching for like, what's that next act? How do we, A, stay relevant, but that's not enough. How do we, you know, discover another gear, right? When it comes to growth. And I think, you know, if you think about something that Grammarly has become really world-class at, and that is seamless integration and ubiquitous presence, right?

[00:03:21] Yuriy Timen: When you use Grammarly, you typically don't think about going to grammarly.com or even using the Grammarly Editor, which some power users, a lot of power users do, but you typically think about how Grammarly just sits on top of any application with a text field, right? Whether it's Slack, whether it's, you know, Microsoft Teams, whether it's, uh your browser, right? So that's what, that's what Grammarly really nailed.

[00:03:48] Yuriy Timen: What is Coda great at? Well, Coda has become kind of a beloved product for kind of getting work done and organizing your work, especially amongst product teams. And they've also been really good with building kind of automations and integrations, right? So if we use our imagination a little bit, you can imagine a world where Grammarly built this really powerful delivery mechanism, right? But today the one value that's being delivered to that delivery mechanism is writing assistance which is an enormous market in and of itself and has allowed Grammarly to grow into a $13 billion company. But think about what other potentially, this is where the new incoming CEO talks about agentic AI, what other potential jobs to be done can you deliver through that kind of like AI pathway or AI highway that Grammarly has built? All right? And I think that's where I think the magic is gonna happen for this new joint entity.

[00:04:52] Andrew Michael: Very interesting. Yeah, definitely. I think there's something magical about the ubiquitous experience. There's something I tried to do with the previous startup as well in the sense that people don't really want another tool in their stack and they don't want to need to go to another destination. And I think that is one of the things that like Grammarly really nailed is that you don't need to go there to get the benefit of it. And it's really, it's just there in the background and pops it up when you need it, disappears when you don't. And I can definitely see the vision that you're painting and you're talking about now in terms of this new agentic workflows. And being able to have that power with you when you need it, but then just allowing it to be in the background when you don't.

[00:05:27] Andrew Michael: So, yep, it'll be a fun one to watch to see where they land and how they shake things up there. Cause I think a lot of companies are going through this process now as well. It's like, it's time to reinvent ourselves and we need to go in and it's actually been incredible to see like , even at the size and scale, like normally we talk about like these large organizations, they can't turn around and that startups can come in and that's how they can get there, they market. But I think in this turn around now that hasn't been the case. I think we've been seeing these really large enterprises, like really just turning things around almost doing a 180 degree, I think of like Intercom where they just went all in almost overnight. It's like, and then some of them, the larger players, like, what is your perspective on this now and seeing how the market's evolving and shaping?

[00:06:11] Yuriy Timen: The perspective on what exactly?

[00:06:13] Andrew Michael: How startups can like sort of keep up with the rate of innovation when we already see like these large organizations moving at that speed where startups typically used to.

[00:06:22] Yuriy Timen:  Yeah, I mean, um we are entering a completely different paradigm. And I'm definitely not smart enough to try to predict where things are going to end up and where most of the value creation is going to take place, right? But I do think that, you know, due to a variety of factors, you know, some of them are geopolitical with the change in the administration in the U.S. some of it is the rate of technological innovation. I think there are a few things that we're going to see. I'm pretty confident.

[00:06:53] Yuriy Timen:  So number one, there's going to be a pickup in M&A activity, right? And what does that mean? That means that there are going to be startups who perhaps are, you know, having a hard time finding relevance or proving that they can have a venture scale outcome in the age of AI, potentially getting scooped up, right? There will be, I think, more mergers, Grammarly and Coda example being a case in point, right?

[00:07:22] Yuriy Timen:  I also think that, you know, I mean, the funding, we already see what's happening with AI funding. And even, you know, some may say that it's, you know, borderline bubble. Our friend is welcome to join.

[00:07:35] Andrew Michael: Yes, sir. I was trying to ignore it.

[00:07:36] Yuriy Timen: No, no, no, don't, don't, don't. Let's roll with the punches. Maybe he has a take on where things are heading.

[00:07:48] Andrew Michael: I ask him every day. So for those listening, my little son just ran in now. He came and grabbed a gift and he left. But yeah, I ask him daily, but he hasn't given me anything yet.

[00:07:59] Yuriy Timen: Yeah, you know, as an aside, actually, I'll maybe come back to it. We were just a bit of a bit of a parenting philosophy that's emerging in light of like, kind of like what skills should we be teaching our kids today, right? And is it really all that like, so the education be like, to what extent should it be the same as it was for us? And to what extent should it be different in again, in light of emerging technology, so I have a little bit of a hot take, I don't know if it's a hot take.

[00:08:28] Andrew Michael: Tell me I'm only as like, because there's something's been on my mind so much as well, like kids' birthdays parties and still hearing parents talking about like the curriculum and things like this. And I'm sitting back and thinking like, is this even relevant anymore, you know?

[00:08:41] Yuriy Timen: Exactly, exactly. But let me just wrap up. Let me just wrap up my answer to your prior question. There's going to be, I mean, obviously there's already a frenzy of funding activity. Some may say we're even in a potential AI funding bubble, but, you know, I don't see that slowing down, to be honest. That also means that probably crappy companies and crappy teams are going to get funded. That's inevitable. At this point, you know, I still don't know where the value capture is going to take place. Like, yeah, we know it's on the compute side. We know it's on the L. So we know it's on the compute side for sure, right? Like that's not getting commoditized away. I mean, even if it does, the rate of growth there is ridiculous.

[00:09:20] Yuriy Timen: What about on the LLM side? I think that that's not where the money is going to get made, right? Like open AI had an advantage, first mover advantage, that's kind of being wiped away, right? And I'm not, I'm no longer hearing, open AI has the best model, right? Or the best models, right? So and you know, Meta is open sourcing their models. So I don't think it's going to be made on the model level either.

[00:09:47] Yuriy Timen: So I still believe that there is going to be a lot of value created at the application level because, you know, I think, the compute side is going to be one by, you know, the magnificent five, if you will. The LLM side, the model side is just going to get commoditized the way I don't think money gets made there. But then there are so many applications that you don't need to build your model anymore so I think that application layer is gonna be really interesting.

[00:10:21] Andrew Michael: Yeah, the consumer facing side of things. I think that's also like one of the thoughts in my mind though is like, if at some point the models just get that good, that application layer becomes redundant then too where it's almost at the point like, I need X, Y, or Z and it's like, yes, X, Y, or Z and like there's no reason to say that that's not something like the bigger models could do, like a ChatGPT or a Claude at the rates which they're innovating. And it definitely feels like they're moving in that sort of direction. Just like every one of the [inaudible] did in the beginning, sort of like , build your app store, show us what you want to do and then sort of commoditize and take over what's working and then drop what's not. So yeah, just like you, it's almost impossible, I think, to predict today where things are going, but...

[00:11:08] Yuriy Timen: Yeah, for sure.

[00:11:10] Andrew Michael: I'm keen to hear where you see schools going.

[00:11:12] Yuriy Timen: Okay, so I don't know where school is going, but I know what I want to teach my kids, right? Like if I think about, I'm going to sound like a grumpy old man, get off my lawn right now, right? But like, when I think about, I have a sister who's 12 years younger than me. So you could argue that that's pretty much, we're a generation apart more or less, right? And you know, I don't want to single out my sister, but you just kind of look at that generation and a lot of questions around like financial literacy.

[00:11:45] Yuriy Timen: Like , you know, you hear all these stats how, you know, kids are not kids, they're really young adults, are taking longer than ever to move out. They continue to live at their parents' house. And, you know, and one of the things that is happening there is they're just kind of a little bit out of touch. There isn't a sense of urgency, but also just a little bit out of touch with what is it actually like how to manage finances and how to project your... you know, spending power, your safety net and things like that, right?

[00:12:13] Yuriy Timen: So, and if this is a trend line, like if we don't do something as parents, at least what does that going to mean, you know, mean for the next generation? So I think financial literacy is like, and that's been talked about for a long time, but I just still haven't seen it make its way into primary education, right?

[00:12:33] Yuriy Timen: Like, I mean, I only have like a, my oldest is a first grader. So I don't expect to see maybe financial literacy there yet, but it's actually also just funny how, you know, they have a completely different concept of money. Like my kids, like, they pretty much never seen cash, right? They also think that everything is just, you know, a mouse click away. They've maybe stepped foot into a physical store, just like with their grandparents to buy them a gift at Target or something.

[00:13:01] Andrew Michael: It's funny. I mean, like my son the other day in the car, I was like, we went and did something, it wasn't, he's like, you want to do something else? I was like, no, like we don't have endless money. He's like, yeah, but you got a card. I was like, yes, but the card has money. And then I had to explain to him how everything works and money's transmitted and so forth and like, it's just so weird, like this foreign concept now is always like, money becomes...

[00:13:22] Yuriy Timen: My daughter the other day was like, it was about money or something. She's like, it's like, wait, she's like, do you have to pay money every day for us to be in this house? I'm like, it's not every day. I'm like, it's every month, but yeah. She's like, whoa.

[00:13:40] Yuriy Timen: Anyways, but the big one, here's the big one. And this is what I was taught, I was, kind of brought this up with my wife in the car the other day is that. Our kids is going to be the first kind of a AI generation where like AI is going to be native to them. They're going to be complete. My wife is the registered nurse and she's like, about our oldest daughter. She's like, well, she could just be a nurse and this, this. I'm like, don't pigeonhole into any career. We don't know in 20 years or in 15 to 20 years when it's time for her to choose, like we don't know what's going to happen to different professions. So we should focus on, them mastering universal skills, right? That are going to give them a leg up regardless where things go. And so I would love to get my kids into some kind of like AI bootcamp. I want them to learn to use AI to augment their abilities from a young age, right?

[00:14:35] Yuriy Timen: Like ChatGPT is not going anywhere, regardless of what you think about it philosophically. It's not like, you know, I'm against AI. Let's, you know, I don't want my kid using ChatGPT. Well, guess what? You're putting them at a disadvantage, right, compared to their peers.

[00:14:51] Yuriy Timen: But I want my kids to learn how to code with the help of AI to learn how to, you know, create processes, automate their work. You know, with the use of AI, I want them to learn more effectively with the use of AI. I want them to be able to take a topic that they like and properly query an LLM and engage with that LLM to learn about that topic, which I think could be much more effective than just kind of flipping through YouTube videos or something.

[00:15:16] Andrew Michael: Yeah. No, for sure. I think it's almost just as hard though, like you say, to predict where things are going in this next wave with who's going to be the winners from a business perspective to like, where things are going to go for the future of our kids as well. And like, I think even thinking through as well, like what skills do you want them to learn? Because I had the similar thoughts as well to you. And I was like, okay, like initially I thought like he needs to, my son needs to learn how to program. And then I was like, does he really need to learn how to program now? Or like, does he need to know how to ask the right questions and to be able to get to the right answer?

[00:15:48] Andrew Michael: Like you say, some of those like fundamental skills of like knowing how to question things, knowing how to like seek answers from multiple sources, how to cross-reference and cross-check. And I think these sort of like more tangible skills are going to become more important in this next world. Like how do you fact check things? And where none of this has been taught at school to like, if anything, like where we're teaching propaganda at school stills and we're not like fact checking, we're not cross-referencing and so forth.

[00:16:15] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I think the AI angle as well is definitely interesting. It's like one of those things. I think my son and I have been like, it giving him almost free reign with ChatGPT in the car whenever he wants. He's like, let's talk to ChatGPT and then we'll start talking about different topics and we'll talk about the moon and then we'll like, starts asking questions now. And it's funny because it's obviously like it's learned my son's name. So they'll be like, that's a good question, Kai. And like, he gets a thrill out of it.

[00:16:38] Andrew Michael: But I think like.. as you say, like teaching them to be able to get the most out of these tools now is definitely putting an advantage, but I think almost no school is willing to take that risk now, at this stage yet to put it in front of parents, in front of kids. Cause I think the vast majority of the population is still scared of these technologies.

[00:16:58] Yuriy Timen: Yep. Yep. And you know, what's going to be a challenge for us. I mean, assuming that you put a premium on this and I do, I think there are certain things about human, like human connection in the absence of technology that I think is good and healthy. And I want to make sure to retain that for my kids, right? So it's like, how do you instill this where I want them to be as adept at leveraging technology as possible in ways that we can't even imagine today and at the same time, I want them to value disconnecting from technology, sitting face to face with someone and building meaningful connections? That's going to be hard.

[00:17:38] Andrew Michael: Extremely difficult.

[00:17:40] Yuriy Timen: Right? Like take Kai, for instance, what if Kai just, you know, like that ChatGPT is his best friend and he's not interested in hanging out with Bobby from class, right? Because, like ChatGPT just gets him.

[00:17:52] Andrew Michael: Bobby takes the toys or doesn't let him do what he wants.

[00:17:57] Yuriy Timen: Or doesn't know as much about the moon. Bobby, doesn't, right?

[00:18:01] Andrew Michael: Who is this guy? He's boring. So it's so hard to sort of figure out, because there was like, we also recently like chose the school for my son and we needed to like go through and look at the different schools and evaluate them. And like, I came to the end of it, I was like, sit to my [inaudible], like, it's almost irrelevant, the choice. Like, I think the main thing is like, we need to think about like, for me, it was just like the surroundings that there'd be in the mindset that there would be in. So like, when I went in, like I want to speak to the teachers, understand like their philosophy in terms of like how to problem solve, like ambition levels and these sorts of things for the kids. And then like the parents that will be around because I'm ultimately like, they're going to be surrounded by these people for whatever it is, like five, six hours, eight hours a day, like whether we like it or not, they've been heavily influenced from that perspective.

[00:18:45] Andrew Michael: So for me, it was more just like, okay, are they being surrounded by kids with the right mindset that are coming from homes where they have that sort of train of thoughts and mindset and like, that's ultimately what drove the decision because it wasn't really the curriculum or the facilities or anything like that, because I feel it's going to be redundant.

[00:19:02] Yuriy Timen: Yep. I hear you.

[00:19:05] Andrew Michael: Nice. But yeah, so I'm sure we could talk about this all day, but it's definitely an interesting topic. And I think obviously like, you are at the center of all this as well, because you're working with so many different companies on a daily basis and you sort of get to see this future. You spent nine years at Grammarly, if I'm correct, and you end up growing and building and like leading a large team there. But as we discussed before the show, this team was really split between product and marketing growth and it [inaudible], first of all, like how that evolves. Because this is something as well, I personally like, I've always felt that I sat at that intersection or maybe even like a step above that where like growth mandate is to find opportunities, no matter where they lie in the organization.

[00:19:45] Andrew Michael: But most companies typically are the gravitate towards like growth marketing or growth products and they have these distinguished lines between the two. So how did it end up working for you at Grammarly and how did you get to that point where you're leading both teams?

[00:19:58] Yuriy Timen: Yeah. So I joined Grammarly in January of 2012 to set the context a little bit. Companies may be doing, you know, several hundreds of thousands in revenue, you know, in ARR, so super duper small. Bootstrapped about 10 people. Everybody is highly technical, either an NLP engineer or a computational linguist. And it's me who's neither of those things. So, you know, and I come on, you know, my title is head of marketing. I'm in my mid twenties, frankly, I have no business being the head of anything, but, you know, the company took a gamble on me. And so I…

[00:20:33] Andrew Michael: Tell us how you landed that role then, like, the only non-technical person at an early stage thought of like that.

[00:20:38] Yuriy Timen:  Well, I mean, they knew that they wanted someone on the go-to-market side. And, you know, I think they were looking for someone with a deep performance marketing experience because, you know, Grammarly, like the early traction that Grammarly demonstrated was through paid channels. Like it had good unit economics and they could acquire users profitably and, you know, Grammarly was founded in Ukraine. And I'm originally from Ukraine, but I've been living in the States since the mid 90s. So I think there was a little bit of a serendipity there where, you know? I don't know if they, they probably reached out to me. They were looking at several profiles. Maybe one of the things that struck about my profile is that like, you know, I'm from Ukraine. So, and the whole team was based in Ukraine. So it'll be kind of, you know, less, more kind of cultural synergy, if you will, right, you know, working with a team out there.

[00:21:28] Yuriy Timen: And for me, that was probably one of the reasons why, this was a cold LinkedIn in-mail that I received from the CEO at the time. And I was receiving a handful of those every week. And it was not a particularly well-written in-mail, but the one thing that stuck out to me was that, okay, here's this, at the time they referred to Grammarly as world's most accurate grammar checker, world's most accurate grammar checker. That was the positioning. Crazy how things change. Eventually we realized no one cared about the final 10% of accuracy. You know what I mean? And like you just needed to be accurate enough. But people were not willing to, you know, make a decision based on that final 5-10% of, you know, accuracy or fidelity.

[00:22:17] Yuriy Timen: And yeah, so they struck up a conversation and this was a textbook example of try before you buy, which I'm a huge believer. I know that not everyone can do it, especially folks earlier in their careers. But Grammarly was basically, hey, let's date before we decide if we want to get married. And so I came on and did like a three month consulting project around affiliate marketing, and we use that, you know, as a way to kind of get to know each other and then felt like it was a good fit.

[00:22:47] Yuriy Timen: So I came on as, the nominally as the head of marketing. I came from a performance marketing background. So at first, I very much leaned into what I knew best, which was performance marketing. I'm really focused on scaling that. And after getting it to a certain scale, I went out and hired my head of performance marketing. That was the first hire I made. Then I turned my attention. So it was very much like a first manager growing their team. I was a pretty junior manager. And so my approach to scaling that, the team was do a thing first, figure out how to do it well, get it to a certain scale, and then figure out what great looks like, and then go and hire someone to lead it. Which is a pretty safe thing to do, but it doesn't, it oftentimes doesn't allow you to move as fast as you need to, right?

[00:23:33] Yuriy Timen: As a more experienced leader, you need to know how to hire for roles that you don't know how to do yourself. But I wasn't an experienced leader at the time, so I kind of would do everything myself before hiring someone into it, right? So I did that for like, let's say my first three to four lieutenants, if you will, for my bench. And then, you know, I never really, I never let my title dictate my scope, to be honest. And Grammarly was a zero ego environment. So I didn't even have a second thought. Like if I, at one point, and I was learning more and advancing in my, you know, understanding of growth and we've already made a bunch of progress on the marketing side, you start seeing as is natural, some diminishing returns in some of your initiatives, or in some of your tracks.

[00:24:20] Yuriy Timen: And looking at that and piecing it all together, I realized that some of our biggest opportunities now laid in an area where I didn't have direct control over and no one was doing anything. And that is from the signup flow to the onboarding experience, to the activation experience, to referral loops, share loops, pricing and packaging and the checkout flows, right? Where I felt like, hey, this is so unoptimized. If we can improve our checkout rate or upgrade rate by like 5%, here's what it means for our ROAS, our return on ad spend, and here's how many more media dollars this opens up for us, right? And at first, I was trying to just kind of influence our product team to spend more time on growth product.

[00:25:15] Yuriy Timen: But it wasn't really going anywhere for a variety of reasons. We had a highly technical product team that was more of like your quintessential, prototypical core feature building team, right? They were motivated by building complex features that take weeks, months, sometimes quarters to bring to life. And they were not, they didn't have a growth bone in their body. They weren't excited by or saw value in doing iterative experimentation. And so after maybe like trying this path for a quarter or two, eventually I just said, hey, can we just do it ourselves? Right? And I saw eye to eye with the co-founders on this. And that's what gave birth to the first iteration version 1.0 of Grammarly's growth product team.

[00:26:05] Yuriy Timen: So we incubated on our team. And that's actually when my title, because you introduced me as the former global head of growth and marketing, I was initially the head of marketing. But it's when we kind of incubated and spun up this growth product team that, you know, just so it made more sense as we were hiring for that team, because it would be weird that the head of marketing is hiring a growth PM, right? And so we kind of had to broaden my titles so that we could also make a home for the growth product team.

[00:26:34] Yuriy Timen: And then I'll just make this last point. That happened maybe three years into my journey there. So for five to six years while there, I was straddling both. And it was a pretty, like, it was a setup that worked really well for Grammarly for a while. We were able to move quickly and we kind of owned the funnel end to end, right? From the ads to the landing page all the way through to monetization. But as the product became more complex, it became harder for growth PMs who were part of my org to work effectively inside the code that the product team owned.

[00:27:13] Yuriy Timen: And when I was leaving Grammarly, one of my record, at that point, you know, when I joined, we were 10 people I was leading, we were 500 people. So a lot has changed. One of my, you know, I had a very unique, unique situation under which I left. It was a personal decision. Nothing about Grammarly was pushing me out. And I made the decision, but I didn't have an end date in mind. I just knew that I wanted to leave. And I worked with the co-founders on the board to figure out the timeline. And we agreed on a six month departure timeline.

[00:27:43] Yuriy Timen: So everybody in the company knew I was leaving, but I had six months. And they said, Yuriy, can you please execute on your own succession plan? Which was like a, you know super gratifying experience. But I say this because, you know, to make a point that as part of one of my first recommendation as part of my succession plan was, hey, this setup has served us well. It's now time to split them up and growth product needs to go and live with product. And by that time, a lot of the prior barriers we've been able to kind of nullify. We had a new product leader who did see value in growth product. The product team was in a much better place to absorb and grow the growth product function. So I'll pause there.

[00:28:31] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And it's very interesting. I see like a lot of parallels in my career and different roles that I've had as well in the sense that it's always been like this idea of like, and then you mentioned something I love the quote was that you never let your title limit your scope and sort of like this growth mindset, you're always trying to seek and understand where that opportunity lies within the organizations. And I think personally, that is the responsibility of growth is that like, it doesn't really matter where it comes from. Like ego should never be a part of it. And it's really about like how can you serve the organization to unlock that?

[00:29:05] Andrew Michael: And while you're talking, I really love the notion as well, like having the two working together. I think definitely at the earlier stage, owning that end to end funnel, because you can really learn then like see experiments through from beginning to end and the real times things that are happening on the one side have a heavy influence on things that are happening on the other side. Like you may be running a new campaign that can adjust the level of quality of signups that are coming through that will ultimately impact activation rates. But when these teams are working in silo, you don't often get those messages across and you can end up getting mixed signals and false positives as a result. So why did you end up deciding that it was not going to work after you leaving? Like what was the, where did things start to break and at what stage did you say, okay, this doesn't make sense anymore for us?

[00:29:48] Yuriy Timen: Yeah. So I would say that there were two primary factors that drove this. It wasn't that things were, we're starting to see the first instances of the combined structure becoming suboptimal. And namely, as the product team built a lot more surfaces. A lot, like the product just became richer, more complex, more jobs to be done, serving more use cases, et cetera. The growth PMs started feeling a little bit too much on the periphery where, you know, they weren't working in partnership with core PMs as much as they needed to be, where the core PMs, you know, driving the feature roadmap and the growth PMs are helping, you know, drive adoption of those features and stuff like that.

[00:30:45] Yuriy Timen: So we started seeing kind of the first cracks there where the growth PMs just weren't, you know, they weren't part of the product team. And for them to be fully in the loop on things, they kind of needed to be fully embedded in that team. And so they felt like they were being kind of pulled in the opposite directions. But even more so, when it came time to look for a backfill at that point, or executed my succession plan, I was a homegrown talent, right? And I was able to direct these two teams somewhat effectively because of like a lot of existing relationships and institutional knowledge that you build over time, right?

[00:31:33] Yuriy Timen: And because I didn't come from a strong prior foundation of either marketing or product. I literally was like molded or molded myself for this role. But now that we needed to hire at the VP level, it would be really hard slash, I don't know, probably a fool's errand to try to find someone at a VP level, 500 million in revenue scale company, that's where Grammarly was at when I was leaving, to effectively lead both. It felt like we would be limiting, like I would have rather went and gotten, and this is what we ended up doing, like a sick ass, pardon my French, VP of marketing, right? But to do that, I needed to just get like a true marketing professional.

[00:32:22] Yuriy Timen: So, you know, part of it was also just a practical thing. So I'm trying to look for a one for one replacement for me. We were going to miss out on the opportunity to bring in some really top-notch talent.

[00:32:34] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I mean, I'm seeing a lot of parallels because like similarly as well being in different situations, like it's, it's not any, it's not a common title. I think you see like head of marketing and growth product growth as well, specifically and can definitely see the challenge in sort of filling that role. And definitely, as you see, like as the product itself scales, like complexity rises and you need to be close to that. What were like some of the benefits, though, that you really felt like helped you during those early stages of having these two teams together? Like, where did you see the most benefit come from being across both sections of growth?

[00:33:10] Yuriy Timen: I mean, listen, the biggest benefit is the direct outflow from a complaint we often hear where growth marketing and product are oftentimes in a, I don't want to say adversarial relationship, but let's just say constantly working out kinks. They're constantly working out kinks, right? Marketing is like, you know, we need more landing pages or we need to do more landing page testing or we need a new sign up flow or we need to experiment more in the funnel so we can improve the metrics there which feeds our user acquisition, right? And growth PMs are like torn between serving marketing and serving some other goals, right, or building like growth platforms.

[00:34:00] Yuriy Timen: Then you have like...And you have this constant kind of like tension if you will, right? And, you know, we were able to essentially eliminate it because we were all part of a single org. We had the same North Star goals. And we were able to actually hire talent that suits the needs, right? So that, you know, we didn't have like someone who let's say was expecting, you know, to work on some like really, I don't know, sophisticated sort of long term, technically complex features. And instead we're putting them in a role where they're iterating on different variants of a signup flow, which again, that is a different profile of a growth PM and different profile of growth engineers that I think thrive in that environment.

[00:34:55] Yuriy Timen: So those are kind of the biggest benefits, I think, of the combined structure. And another thing is that it allowed us to sequence. We didn't have this like artificial divide where let's say, marketing is responsible for, I don't know, signups. And then everything after signup growth product takes over. And then there's constantly growth products like, why is, our activation rate is down. What happened to the signup, like to the traffic mix, right? And they're just like throwing shit across the wall to each other. We didn't have that. We can work in synergy. We could create these pods and be like, okay, we're going after certain audience segments. We got someone responsible for channels. We've got someone responsible for funnel, right? And they can kind of work in a much more synergistic fashion.

[00:35:41] Andrew Michael: Now I think it's amazing when you, that works nicely together because then it isn't that situation like we described as I described earlier, it's like you may be running something in marketing and they're totally screws with the activation rates and then further down the funnel, the impacts, conversions to customers. And having that sort of that full cycle, a full loop responsible with one team, like then there's no pointing fingers. There's like, okay, when it comes time to evaluating what to work on and those discussions are happening. And there's a thought that goes into like what are going to be the downstream impacts or the upstream impacts of the changes that we make. And there's definitely a lot of pros on that side from like, I'd say from the user journey perspective as well, and being able to own that full cycle. I see we're running up on time though as well. So I want to make sure I ask you a couple of questions I ask every guest.

[00:36:26] Andrew Michael: What's one thing that you know today about churn and retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career?

[00:36:32] Yuriy Timen: The biggest bang for your buck on maximizing retention and minimizing churn comes from things you do in the first user session or call it the first week, somewhat product dependent. And that's where you're going to get probably 80% of the return. It's a little bit of a hot take. People can push back on this, but the faster you dial in on the right definition for your activation event, the faster you zero in on your value loop, like what is that one value loop that gets the user attached to the app attached to the product. The faster you identify your aha moment when the user truly gets it, that's the best thing you can do for your retention.

[00:37:26] Yuriy Timen:  A lot of the work further like, our week four or like, you know, our D60 retention, you know, is 20%. Let's focus on getting it up to 25%. And you come up with ideas that are focusing on like users who are like already using your product for like, wait, from my experience, so hard to move that. So f-ing hard to move that.

[00:37:52] Andrew Michael: 100%. No, no, I wouldn't say it's a hot take. 100% agree with you on this. And like, I think this is also something that in a pre, like very, very early episode with Shaun Clowes on Atlassian, what they ended up realizing was like the single biggest predictor of if somebody would retain and become a customer or not was the length of their first session. So if they spend 30 minutes in their products on their first session, they're almost always going to become a customer. If they spend 30 minutes or less, they will almost likely never become. And that sort of also goes like a little bit counter intuitive to the content. You need to get them as well as fast as possible. You need to get them like speed, but also sometimes just like time in product and are they actually like spending time putting in the effort to get things set up and [inaudible] for them.

[00:38:39] Andrew Michael: Nice. All right. When it comes to growth, then obviously you advise a lot of startups, what's one question that you wish more startups would ask you, but they don't?

[00:38:51] Yuriy Timen: Is it time to focus on growth? This is like, I would say, speed stage and sometimes early series A companies where they right away assume that it's time to grow and they may actually have like really bad, you know, retention and product market fit indicators. And so focusing on growth would basically just, you know, result in a leaking bucket.

[00:39:21] Yuriy Timen: But few of them are meticulous and disciplined enough around figuring out do I have initial PMF? Are my retention metrics up to par to start kind of investing more in the top of the funnel? So that will be the one obvious one that comes to mind.

[00:39:40] Andrew Michael: Yep. And I think that's like one of the things when it comes to channel retention, I think this has shifted and changed probably over the last like two to three years, but prior to that, like used to be growth at all costs. And then at some point in time, somebody who comes and says, hey, like I did this growth ceiling calculator and we're going to stop growing in a few months like if we don't figure this out. Then it becomes like, oh shit, like let's pay attention. And often while then it's too late as well for a lot of companies.

[00:40:07] Andrew Michael: Very nice. Yuriy, I think we could have like continued chatting for the next hour on these topics, but I really appreciate like having a good chat today. I think like the idea around what's next in schooling and stuff, that's definitely something that like interested me a lot and if there's any listeners that have any hot takes or they want to share some advice as well, we'd love to hear from you. Really appreciate the time today and I wish you best of luck now going forward.

[00:40:30] Yuriy Timen: My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Happy to do this again.

[00:40:33] Andrew Michael: Thanks, Yuriy. Cheers.

[00:40:41] Andrew Michael: And that's a wrap for the show today with me, Andrew Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you were able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with Churn.FM and be notified about new episodes, blog posts and more, subscribe to our mailing list by visiting churn.fm.

[00:40:41] Andrew Michael: Also don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you. And you can provide your blunt, direct feedback by sending it to Andrew at churn.fm. Lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review as it really helps get the word out and grow the community. Thanks again for listening. See you again next week.

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