[00:01:16] Andrew Michael: Hey, Kevan. Welcome to the show. 

[00:01:19] Kevan Lee: Thank you. Great to be here.

[00:01:21] Andrew Michael: It's great. Savvier for the listeners. Kevan is the head of marketing at Oyster, a distributed HR platform

 that enables global employment for companies everywhere. They're on a mission to create a more equal world and unlock opportunity for people regardless of their. Kevan started out his career as a sports reporter before later, joining Buffer, where he served as the VP of marketing.

He's also a founding fellow of on-deck and a product led growth coach. So my first question for you, Kevan, is like, how do you feel your early experience as a reporter helped you on your career path you're on today?

[00:01:52] Kevan Lee: Yeah, I was just thinking I had no concept of churn when I was a sports reporter. It was much simpler role in a lot [00:02:00] of ways.

I think one of the things that I took away from. Period was there's a lot of deadline pressure when you're working with a newspaper or when you're a reporter and, the paper is going to print at midnight and whether you're in with your story's done or not, it's just going to print. And so there was a really, it was a really useful time for me to understand how to deliver under pressure, how to deliver under a timeline with the deadline.

And I think that helps. In the tech scene and the startup scene where you have to move fast. A lot of ways, there's not the same deadlines worth of something that's going to go to print and he can't pull it back. But if you're not moving fast enough, then I think you, we started. Problems across the business.

So there's still some deadlines in this world. So that's one of the big takeaways for me from that. 

[00:02:46] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I see, I think as you said, like the deadline in the startup is not moving fast. There is a deadline. I start up just and it's very interesting as well. I think there was this one thing, one of my ex co-founders said to me once it, it stuck with me so much.

It's like nothing [00:03:00] makes us more productive than the last minute. And I think if you think in the context, as well of mentioned, like trying to reach these things are like often find us all, like when the pressure's really on, like that's when, like I become super productive, I think, and get things done and

[00:03:13] Kevan Lee: My work tends to expand, to fill the time that I give it. And so if I give myself too much time to do something, I will use all that time, whether I need it or not. And so I often think ahead and give myself some artificial stuff. I just have to cut it down. 

[00:03:28] Andrew Michael: So we're chatting about this a little bit before, but you had a few different roles now at different like tech startups dealing with SaaS and churn, maybe what would be nice. We agreed would be good to just go through three different startups. Did you be in a previously, like what the challenges were with churn and retention there and how it came into your also maybe should we get started with Buffer? I think that's where I first actually came across your work as well as back in the day.

It was definitely, and still probably is like one of the startup darlings had done a few put it that way. Just like the philosophy and the way of working. And th they're really sets a lot of [00:04:00] trends, I think, for other startups that have been followed today. So what is the experience like there?

[00:04:06] Kevan Lee: Yeah, that was fantastic. I joined as employee number 17 at around one or 2 million MRR, I think at the time. And there was. Grow with the team and with the company past, almost up to 25 million, the team and that being close to a hundred. And so had a really fun journey there. I started in a content marketing role, and then eventually it took over all of marketing as the company grew.

When it came to churn and retention. Obviously I think like Buffer in operating in a crowded space, like SMB is also typically very difficult when it comes to churn and retention. What are some of the challenges that you face as a business and how did, what is marketing's responsibility within that then with that Buffer?

[00:04:53] Kevan Lee: Yeah, it was a really interesting experience to me, just in terms of the scale. At Buffer. And millions [00:05:00] of users, hundreds of thousands of paying customers, but a very low price point. And I think that enabled a lot of movement of our user base across a number of different plans. And so we'd see a revenue churn and look stiff, put differently for us.

We measured that as, maybe someone going from a business plan. Premium plan or pro plan. We had customer churn with it, know folks would stop paying us on together. And so we had a number of different dimensions to our churn problems or our churn metrics. And so we have a lot of different tactics that we would need to apply to address different moments within there.

I think from the marketing side, a lot of it was about coming up with our core differentiation from our competitors. We're in a space of social media management where there's, great, wonderful tools like sprout social, and who's sweet later, the switch inertia from taking your social accounts from one place to another is [00:06:00] not super great, like super large insights.

It's easy enough to switch back and forth. So what was unique about Buffer and how do we communicate that with our marketing messaging? So you mentioned Buffer being a darling of the texts, sitting there start seeing it in some ways. And I think a lot of that came down to. Brand and our culture.

And so that ended up being a reason why people stayed with us, which is like totally separate from the product. But learning how to lean into that as a way to retain was just a very unique lesson, I think, in and unique to what we built at Buffer. 

[00:06:30] Andrew Michael: Yeah, absolutely. I think this is one of the things as well, where it's saying this people, but I think like why.

People really overlook how many different factors can influence churn and retentionand this sort of fact of just like really leading into the brand and leaning into the philosophy and the way of working can actually end up having that knock on effect of helping you retain customers, because they're really buying in and they want to be a part of what Buffer is building and what Buffer stands for.

[00:06:56] Kevan Lee: Absolutely. Yeah, we would look to the inbox sometimes and people would say, [00:07:00] We're paying for you, even though we're not using you. I feel that they're not using the product, but they believe in what we're doing. I don't know if that's, that's maybe a different problem or different challenge. In fact, they stayed even though just for the brand itself.

[00:07:13] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And I think this is one of the things that gets very difficult to measure the. And it also takes very long to see a big impact. It's not one of those like immediate things that you can just, okay, we're gonna, we need to self-generate attention. Let's start working on this. But I think the impact it has over time is probably one of the greatest things you can have when you've built a brand that people absolutely loved it. They're sending you a message saying we're still paying you, but we're not using you. Like you can't get better than that. I think. 

[00:07:41] Kevan Lee: Yeah. We like to think of brand as this. Handle effect or this overarching layer on top of the other growth loops that we've built and stuff we've built a growth loop around content or word of mouth brand then becomes just additional fuel or maybe really grease if it's a flywheel, like it just makes the wheel spin even faster [00:08:00] in a way, like if it's not the wheel, because people aren't going to come to buffer and pay for our product, just because they know we're remote or that we're transparent.

And it has to be a coordinated there. Once they have that coordinate, hopefully you've already got that bias. I think on the flip side brand can keep folks around, but there, I think what we found over time is that it's not going to save you. It's not going to cure all those stuck in a save you forever.

There is a point in which the products no longer serves the need to such a degree that they will leave. Even if they loved the brand, they can stay a brand advocate without using your product. I think that's. The churn conversation for us really started heating up a little bit 

[00:08:43] Andrew Michael: for sure. And I think that's also a really interesting topic on itself is that.

The jobs to be done of a customer when they first sign up versus six months versus 12 months, first, 18 months does evolve over time levels of sophistication increase and being able to adapt and move to those [00:09:00] additional use cases. As they're growing sophistication becomes really important as well.

[00:09:05] Kevan Lee: Maybe, especially. So at least in our case, in social media where the networks themselves are evolving very fast therefore our tools have to evolve very fast and it's almost like we mapped our customer journey once. And at the end of the customer journey there became this cycle, this loop, where now every month someone is making a choice, whether.

To use buffer again or not. I almost have to like, we acquire them every month just because things are changing so fast. 

[00:09:32] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think this was for me, always one of the biggest worries with businesses like that is when you're building your business on top of somebody else's business and the mountain rapids feed of change on both sides.

It's always playing this cat and mouse game of catch up trying to make sure that you're delivering the goods. I'm interested in this sort of the work that you mentioned as well. So you found that like you really needed to focus on how buffer was different and obviously one side of it was the brand, but what did that [00:10:00] work look like?

How did the team go about figuring out what those differentiators should be or how you should be presenting those differentiators? Was there any sort of specific research work that was done or. 

[00:10:14] Kevan Lee: Probably like a lot of companies, we had your traditional customer research and market research functions.

So talking to users, talking to customers, talking to members of our audience on what they needed, what they wanted. So there's definitely an element of that. I think it got more clear for us over time, as well as we narrowed in on a specific persona or ideal customer profile, we had got a lot more insight into what we should build and why we should build it.

And so for us, as an example, Early on in my journey there, we had this choice, whether we keep building for agency customers, or whether we switch gears and build for like small businesses. And I think an agency customer has different needs for a social media platform than a single spot business where they agency [00:11:00] would care about doing things in book and profile management and reporting and all these different things.

Whereas the sub, this is under cares about reach and quality of. Okay. Saving time and I'll be all these things. I just care about that too, but I think it's a very different use case for us. And so understanding, the distinction between our personas there, and then within that small business percent of there's still a need to differentiate from the competitors.

And so a lot of that then became competitive research. Secret shopping or signing up and using, since we were all freemium products at the time setting up and using other platforms. Noticing the directions they were building in and then what we wanted to do ourselves. And so one of the features I remember that was unique was there was this concept of recycled content on social media.

So if I had a post that did really well on Twitter, I might post it again, once a month or every month forever. Maybe I don't think people do that anymore, but that was the case a few years ago. And so I bet we could have built that into our platform that said, click this button that we will reshare this post.

Regularly throughout. And a lot of our competitors did that. [00:12:00] I think for us, it was a conscious choice to, to move away from that, with in the spirit of, we believe that there's, this is the way you'll see success on social media. So we're building a platform for that, which then we can, backup with messaging and campaigns and all sorts of marketing material.

[00:12:20] Andrew Michael: Nice. Yeah. And I think it's interesting, that notion of just looking at what competitors are doing art, then not being. Pulled into the sort of the bells and whistles that everybody has in feeling like you need to catch up on feature parity. I think that just becomes a trap. And it's one of the things that we've trying to be so careful with this time round, is it like, just really focusing on just doing one thing and doing one thing really well and knowing who you're doing that one thing really well for.

But it is, I think in the early days, it's definitely a challenge. I don't think like buffer started out with this. Oh, you mentioned that you don't have this clear clarity from day one and. Figuring out that just takes time in order to work in a lot of research at the end of that, let's fast forward [00:13:00] to then to the next company we spoke about was Polly.

Like maybe you can just give us a quick overview of what Polly does and what are some of the challenges that you saw there? 

[00:13:08] Kevan Lee: Yeah, so Polly is an instant engagement app for teams and it lives within slack and Microsoft teams and zoom. And so at Polly, we had a real. Powerful growth engine on the back of these marketplaces that we were part of.

And so being in an integration with slack and Microsoft teams, you get access to this huge audience, which is a fantastic way to grow a company quickly. And so we definitely felt the benefits and the tailwinds of that. I think the challenges that exposes for you is that. A lot of people come into your product with their own preconception of what you do and what they're trying to get out of you.

I think there's less of a, it's a much shorter [00:14:00] customer journey in the sense that, I'm a, I'm an end user who is in the slack marketplace one minutes, clicking on Polly to install it the next and then using Polly with my team without having a very long. Education buying cycle at all. And so I think for us, there's obviously there's a challenge there of how do you move someone from a free user to a pay to use it, but then once they become a paid user, for whatever reason, how do you keep them there?

How do you keep showing the value of Polly and in the way that we believed was the true value of how do you get them to that, that idealized aha moment and state. And so a lot of that did come back to marketing. So we have. Some control over what our presence looks like in the marketplaces. And we optimize that.

I think beyond that, then like, how can we set ourselves up as a thought leader in this space that we want to be known for, which would be something. I can like real-time feedback for your team. Sometimes when you work remotely, [00:15:00] you're not really sure how that zoom call just went with your team because you don't see what people are talking about afterward or how the body languages after the call.

And so if you can send a quick polar survey, you can get that pulse check. How do you collect feedback on a design that you're doing in slack without having to wait 24 to 48 hours? If you're sending out. Employee NPS survey, and you want really good response rates. Like you can do that with him within Polly.

And so these use cases then became really important for us to shift perspective from I use Polly to figure out where everyone wants to go from, for lunch to, I use Polly for making my team better. Like we perform better. We use Pauline I think that performance bit that's the real hook that would keep people protected if they.

Kind of fell back down into thinking. Nepali is a lunch pool app that was. 

[00:15:57] Andrew Michael: Yeah, that's very interesting. And then [00:16:00] just really trying to understand what all the different use cases of the product and educating the team. How did you go through that within the context of a slack app or Microsoft teams?

Like, how are you. Educating users of the different use cases and encouraging those, because I think you don't have the same freedom and flexibility you do have when it's your own product. And what are some of the ways that you are trying to reach your audience to let them know that these different use cases?

[00:16:27] Kevan Lee: Yeah, it's a really good observation. So we have a little bit of surface area within the products themselves within slack, Microsoft teams. And so when you initially get started, there's a home screen where you can put a bit of information. We believe Polly does best. But probably the big, the biggest lever for us ended up being templates.

And so we tried to drag people into template usage where you say here's a template on how to ask this question or here's templates for meetings or here's templates for people in HR teams to ask folks, Scott, that was probably the biggest lever that we [00:17:00] got to use, because then we could put our own spin on which ones we thought were most useful support, and we could bring a data.

Mindset of these are the ones that are most used and most popular. We can tie that into our own knowledge of data. Like people who send this type of polar survey end up staying activated end up staying retained. So let's highlight that, but we have these options within the app. And so it was an interesting data play.

Cause you get so much data when you're in these marketplaces and have that amount of volume. It's like, how can you use that data then? Create a customer journey and experience that drives people toward this idealized end state. 

[00:17:39] Andrew Michael: Yeah. So then like marketing really becomes about education and Educating, basically your customers, how to use the product better, as opposed to really thinking about how to reach customers, because you solve that with the marketplace to some degree as well.

[00:17:52] Kevan Lee: It was a bit of a switch. So one of the roles that was really important for us on the marketing side was a lifecycle role at lifecycle for [00:18:00] us looked a lot of different ways, but it was, you had your in channel messaging. So when you send a policy. That's like a Polly box, then the surface, the results to you, or convince you to check in, or just like a channel there's email.

Cause we get email addresses. There's just a lot of different ways that we can engage those users, but it is more about engagement rather than enquiring at that stage.

[00:18:22] Andrew Michael: Nice. And I think from, you mentioned that the growth loop that you get from it, Nevara Letty. We had Fletcher argument on the show before from help which is also a sort of it was, it started out as a slack integration and like the viral loop that they were able to create. There was unbelievable.

I think if I remember correctly, that what they were able to do was when somebody installed. Into slack, any user that they're added to the channel that was created for help was automatically created an account within help, that there then have like username and password. They're going to go login. So like the friction onboard people onto their tool was [00:19:00] almost like nothing.

As long as you're in a slack channel, you have, you've been added to help now and you have access to it and you can go and login using your slack log himself on that. Like incredible how. Thank you can spread so fast throughout an organization like that. We, in the past, like maybe you'd need to send an invite via email to your teammates or whatever.

No, just join the slack channel and you're in. 

[00:19:20] Kevan Lee: Yeah. So I fixed it very seamless, which we appreciate it. And I think then the next trick is like, how do you monetize to make the most of that volume and scale to, without scaring people away so that's. Related to churn and retention, but I think that another big piece of that market.

[00:19:36] Andrew Michael: Sure. I think Slack's onboarding is I don't know, a better company that does onboarding better than slack, and then managed to replicate that experience as well for their marketplace, which is amazing fast forward. Now then today Oyster HR. Tell us a little bit about it. What are some of the challenges you face there, obviously a completely different business, a different sector, different customers?

[00:19:58] Kevan Lee: Yeah, [00:20:00] absolutely. It's it's been a very fun journey for me. I've been here six months and we've seen incredible growth over those last six months. We've only had a product for about a year. Now we have raised a series, a and a series B. From the team just tremendously over that time. And so for us we exist in this really special moment where we're helping companies hire people from around the world.

And so obviously the pandemic has accelerated that movement for pretty much every company at least have that way of thinking. And within the HR and people's spaces, the hiring like hiring global employment in particular, The dynamics are just so different from a buffer dynamics or from a Polly dynamics you're dealing with different scale.

You're dealing with different price points. It's just a very different motion altogether. So we're mostly sales led today. If there's a product led component that a lot of other competitors in our space. So looking at as well, but from an churn and retention [00:21:00] we have some really interesting dynamics that would just.

[00:21:04] Kevan Lee: That are very closely to how hiring works in general. And so when you hire someone on a platform you're not really going to no longer need to have someone hired on the software platform until that person no longer works for you instead. It's not like we experienced churn when someone doesn't want to use this anymore.

It's just very different in that sense. Like the trigger for churn is. Leaving your company as an employee rather than you tiring of the product or whatever, there's a bit of switching that happens. But even then the switch inertia is pretty high in our place. And so that one of the key ways is that people leave.

I think the other key way is that when you get to, when you're hiring internationally, One of the things that waster enables you to do is not have to go through the time and hassle and cost of setting up your own entity that's compliant and everything within that country that we handle that for you.

We have entities around the world, and one of the other [00:22:00] churn factors, then it's will there be companies who reach a certain threshold of, oh, where US-based computer now has 50 employees in France. It may make sense for that company then to set up their own entity and France, in which case they wouldn't need a product like ours anymore.

It's not a use case that happens very often at all, but it is like another churn trigger. And so we're very lucky that the certain triggers are very A few and far between in terms of volume. And they are very unique in terms of the types of companies that ever reached that stage. And it's been a needs differing churn journey then at buffer and Polly.

[00:22:33] Andrew Michael: Yeah, for sure. I think like what you're describing like graduation churn when a customer becomes more successful and grows out of your platform? I think puffer probably face something similar as well. As companies started to grow and scale in size, they needed more sophisticated.

Leaving that SMB space. But I definitely see how something like Oyster HR is almost the complete opposite where like churn is not really an issue because most of the times it's really outside of your control. There's not much you can do for stopping somebody [00:23:00] employees from leaving their company.

So it really is. Becomes a totally different game. And I think for like marketing and sales, if anything, it's more just about finding the right fits customers to begin with. The new thing else is like not much more you can do than that because once you are in it, it's like you said, like that inertia to.

Uproot my employees now and move to another provider and try and figure that all aspect gives me anxiety. Just bu thinking about it, 

it does 

[00:23:28] Kevan Lee: like us to get rid of anxiety. So yeah, you don't want to necessarily from a marketing perspective. So yes, there's those, there's two scenarios where turn happens. A third one then is if customer experience is so bad that.

With the customers is forced to look elsewhere and we see we see the potential for that just given how complex it is to hire globally. And so from a marketing perspective, then it's important for us to set the proper expectations for what someone can and will receive from our service when they join.

Otherwise, they're going to join and be like, oh [00:24:00] what about this? What about that? And we're like, oh, It's not something we offer. So I think marketing's role then is yes, let's acquire folks because she has scaled there because they're going to be essential. Great. There's going to be such a great expansion of lifetime value from them, but at the same time, let's make sure that they know what they're getting when they join us.

So that there's no brand risk. There's no bad word of mouth. Churn from customer experience. So there's it's been a very interesting shift in perspective of marketing plans. It's like, how can we talk about waste, turn away that people get exactly what they know they're getting when they join us.

[00:24:33] Andrew Michael: And I think this is It's so important to remember as a marketer as well. At this point, it's often like it's so easy to get lost in like overselling what you deliver and in some business it's critical that you really don't want to get over selling anything at all. You're just like, what do you see on the box is what you get in.

People don't want surprises. And I think in some cases like people can forgive things if they see things are coming. But when it comes to say you're saying, like in this case where you're actually hiring and these legal involved [00:25:00] there's accounting risk involved, like you need to know what you're walking into.

And as a marketer, like you need to have a, you have a big responsibility then as well to ensure that's what you're going. And I think. Typically you try to sugarcoat things and in some cases, people end up trying to just Polish turds. I think this was like a sangria quite a bit, but sometimes you just need to like, say, okay, our product is shit, but this is things that they are coming in are improving.

[00:25:24] Kevan Lee: I'm not saying anything. Yeah, it's true. I think there's, I've always felt this. Tension between marketing, wanting to be this very forward-looking and like streets ahead view of like we are leading the company forward and that this aspirational vision of what we expect to become, whereas maybe not reality in that's a very tricky line to balance in a way.

And so that's always part of the conversation for me and other interests. A piece of that is when I was at buffer, this didn't happen. [00:26:00] Only happened once. So it is not indicative of foe ability there. But remember someone was telling me the person who was leading our product launch campaign.

We didn't want them to hear any customer feedback or read any reviews or anything like that. We just wanted them to have this thing. Ignorance is bliss perspective when it came to promoting the products so that they. All rainbows and sunshine. And this is great, which I think is essentially a wonderful place to like to operate from if I don't want, when I'm putting together messaging for a product, I don't want to be pulled down into it doesn't really do this, or don't know if this is a hundred percent sure.

Let's start from the idealized perfect state and build our messaging there. And then yes, let's hold it up to the fire and make sure it's actually true. But yeah. That's I think that's where the balance is. If you start from that place of, this is the best thing ever, and then maybe back up a little bit from that, for reality, I think that ends up with the best balance on that thing.

[00:26:56] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think with everything, cause sometimes being too [00:27:00] restricted from the stocks, you just end up even on the product side, just like delivering a subpar product in the way of thinking and stuff. It's see the future and then. What are the steps you can take now to get them? Let's talk about that.

10 it's moving that's yeah, I think the consistency is probably the other piece. So if we're excited from our first moment, when you get in touch with us, with the messaging, what brought you in to buffer or pollen your oyster let's continue with that throughout the customer journey.

[00:27:25] Kevan Lee: Then it's not just Hey, come over here. Look at us how great this is, you sign up. And then we forget about you. It's this is how great it is. And then throughout the journey, You're part of something great. You're part of something great. You're part of something great to see what's happening.

That's the key to shifting that from we're here just to acquire, you said we're here to build a relationship with you and keep you over time. 

[00:27:43] Andrew Michael: Repetition. Cool. I see we're running up on time. Kevan it's been great chatting. I have one question I ask every guest. And they're gonna ask you to say, let's imagine a hypothetical scenario now that you're joining your company. General attention is not doing great at this company. [00:28:00] And the CEO comes here and says, Hey, Kevan, I clearly need to turn things around. We have 90 days to reduce churn.

You're in charge. What do you do? But the caveat is you're not going to tell me I'm going to go and speak to customers and understand what the biggest pain point is. And then start there. You're just going to choose something that you've seen be effective in reducing turn fast in the past and run with that playbook.

Blondie, what would you choose? You didn't make it harder. Take away all the easy options.

I'll give you two answers. You're not gonna the first answer. The first answer is. I don't know that I don't know that I would join a company of my sharing is such a big problem that I have to focus on in my first 90 days. And so just to note that, I think that's something that I've learned to ask in the interview process is what is your chart?

That does not answer your question. So the real answer to the question I think for us at buffer, something that was really important was lifecycle emails, specifically the Dunning emails that happened around payments. And so that would be [00:29:00] the playbook that I would run. That's shore those up.

Let's deliver delight there. That's make sure they're delivering correctly and working correctly and an optimal. No payment state. It's interesting. The email specific is one. You can see that differently when you have the volume and size of buffer as well. Like a few small percentage points can make quite a big difference and everyone numbers.

So last question then is what's one thing that you noted by churn or attention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career? Oh, so I. Didn't give churn and retention enough importance and priority when I started. And so I think you have to solve fraternity retention before you solve for it, so everything else is all your returns are going to be diminished unless you saw. At the bottom. And so for me, I started solving at the top. Let's acquire, let's get as many people in here as possible, which is great also, it's not going to have the impact that you want if they're all falling out of the fund.

Absolutely. It's definitely, [00:30:00] we talk about this a lot in the show and I think. Acquiring customers to 60, but keeping them as, and being so much in the past, but more and more people now are realizing this. They're just like nothing else matters in a subscription business. If people are canceling subscriptions, like what business do you have?

So it's

nice having, is there any final thoughts you want to leave the listeners with? How can they keep up to speed with your work?

Yeah. So I'm Kevan Lee on all the social channels.Kevan Lee. And I write a weekly newsletter that goes out on Sundays. You can find that on sub stack, it's the sub stack and my website is coming late. So I'm fortunate to have. Spelling name or a different spelling name. So I have all my usernames everywhere.

Very nice. Yeah. We'll definitely make sure we'll drop those in the show notes as well for you. So if you want to check that out there too, but yeah. So thanks so much. It was great chatting today, Kevan and wish you best of luck now going forward. [00:31:00] Great. Thanks so much, Andrew. Appreciate it. 

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