SaaS增长引擎：电商打法、付费验证与Meta+Google核心渠道

probably fire most of your marketing team. My philosophy is that the ecom playbook is the right playbook for SAS. Every single scent needs to equal a purchase or an add to cart. Matt Winsky, he's worked at Superhum. He's worked at Whisperflow and now he's just joined Excelbacked Victor.com and he's looking to make it third time. I wouldn't say lucky cuz he is a master of growth. Look at Superhuman and Whisper. These are two of the fastest growing product like growth products and this is a masterclass in how you grow really freaking fast in a world of AI.

Paid is the easiest way to validate that you have PLG. I say there's the core three of any acquisition engine. You have metagoole and life cycle. You probably need at least 400 to 500 new creatives a month. We have kids that are like 17, 18, 19 that are making 20, 30k a month just making a couple ads for us.

Ready to go. Matt, it is so good to have you on the show. So, thank you so much for joining me, Matt.

Yeah, thanks for being here.

Now, you've worked with some of the best companies from Superhum to Whisper now with Victor and we've seen these companies and a huge amount of SAS companies rise with the product leg growth PLG motion. And now we're entering a world of agents. What changes in the growth world when we shift from humans to agents with product like growth?

That's a great question. I think uh I mean all of the the startups I've worked with uh have been PLG, right? And I think in a world of agents uh there's definitely a layer where PLG still matters because PLG assumes you have a perfect self-s serve funnel to the human. And in the same way, you're definitely going to want to optimize it for how is an agent doing research? How is it picking the tools and the APIs that it's actually using?

And I think it just takes the same framing and diligence to why the product already worked from the human end and just understand how are agents making decision-making. So the the the best companies in PLG focus right now will also be best positioned in my opinion for the agentic layer of essentially decisions being made without that human in the loop when tools are being selected for certain tasks. When you look back at say superhuman if we go back in time chronologically it grew very kind of craftsmanlike with founder referrals.

What's your reflections or lessons from that experience on Superhumans's growth that you've taken with you?

The the tastem of what it means to create a strong product. Uh like that for me was born while I was at at Superhum. Uh because at the end of the day, no matter whether you know, if you've used Superhum, you've likely stayed using Superhum just because every little element of that product is is hyperrefined to make you want to continue using it. Um but I think the the difference of what was the early scale of superhuman where it was super founderled word of mouth referral uh there was essentially a asimtope that you know the the product hit where they had it they had to follow a different playbook and uh there was a like this was you know 3 years ago roughly uh and uh back then you know what was SAS now we call AI SAS uh everyone was running more of the uh you know just PLG motion referral word of mouth without doing paid and they were laughing like you know ecom's been doing you know the the UGC programs hundreds of thousands of ads like paid ad spend is the way to drive performance and the resistance was definitely there while I was at superhuman uh but you know seeing what you know I've been able to do alongside a great team at whisper and now victor uh my philosophy is that the ecom playbook is the right playbook for SAS because uh if you look at ecom you have Every single scent needs to equal a purchase or an add toart.

You have hundreds of UGC creators, variety of creative, and you also have a ton of channels that you're essentially balancing to showcase the entirety of the brand. And that's the model that I took and applied at the end before the the Grammarly acquisition at Superhum to to scale paid and then follow that exact same motion for whisperflow. Uh, and I think that's that's really what put it on the map and got it to where it is.

Because like we were talking about before, uh, distribution to me is the only moat. And you have to have that strong of a playbook when it comes to marketing. Cuz like in today's world, that's the only way to succeed.

Dude, I'm going to love this show because most people say the same thing. And what everyone tells me is that no, no, you should wait to do paid. You should wait to do paid. it's a dangerous drug that you can get hooked on. When is the right time do you think then?

Right away. Right. So like at the end of the day uh paid is the easiest way to validate that you have PLG that you have a product that can scale in any way, shape or form, right? Like there there's a ton of narrative that like focus on brand go uh organic content build all that base. That just takes too much time. And uh yes, do that motion while also doing all of paid because you can refine messaging, do creative testing, test your funnels, test your positioning all within a week on paid.

How long is that going to take you if you do some content writing, you talk about it on a podcast, you see if it sticks, you're going to do some user interviews, great. Do all of that, but then you have a much faster engine of validation on the other side on the paid amplification end. When we actually break that down, if I'm an early stage founder, what should I actually do? How much money should I take to spend on page?

Should I do it on one channel versus 10 channels? If I'm an early stage company, I don't have mega budget. What do I actually do?

Yeah. So, I mean, I would say it's it's definitely start with what I say is the the core two. Uh, so like I say there's the core three of any acquisition engine. You have met Google and life cycle. And obviously like your site and all the rest is is in the middle. uh because you have your uh strong video intent platforms both in meta and like YouTube ads. You have the search intent of like people not knowing your product exists but they're searching for something right via the keywords.

And then uh I add in life cycle as well because if you don't have a net to like nudge people and show up in the right place, email, SMS, whatever it is, push if you have an app, um you want those three three things spun up because you can scale to your first million 10 million ARR just off of those three things. Um, and then obviously, you know, you're you're you're investing into the site, you're investing into founderled content.

There's like the other things in there, but in paid, just focus on meta and Google and you'll totally be fine. Everyone's like, "Oh, we have to do TikTok and Reddit." Like there comes a time and place to add in a million things because in the same way that like uh a lot of people get lost with agents is they like start doing a million things with agents and they do them all poorly. It's the same thing here, right? If you do a million channels and you do them all poorly, it's not going to help you out.

Okay. So, we have Ma, we have Google, we have Life Cycle, and we start spending, I don't know, let's just put a hundred grand down there. Let's say we've raised a if we raised a $3 million seed round, is 100 grand fair.

Yeah. I mean, I I think it depends on like your average revenue per user in the unit economics, right? Because it depends how long is your funnel, what what is that 100K going to give you, right? I think that's uh but usually I'd say like yeah if you raise let's say 3 to 5 million that's like a good start budget to essentially validate that we put money people are going to actually want my product.

What should we be looking for then? We have 100k and we put it across matter and Google I should say those two. What is a sign that it is working versus not workin