Welcome back everybody to the latest episode of Stacking Growth. This is Cassidy. I'm here today with Carl. Carl, how you doing?
I'm just Friday. Cassidy, I'm pumped. I pumped about our guests. We're about to talk to something that I talked about.
So now you know, is near and dear to my heart and that nobody really does very well. And then Peter Walker appears in our lives. So I'm very excited. Peter, welcome to the show.
Head of insights at Carter. How you doing? Doing all right. I think that was setting the expectations a little too high, but I'm hoping that hit that bar.
So I'm going to be with you guys. Yeah. What I'm impressed about is Carl for season three, you really had this initiative to bring on folks who use data to drive the strategy and insights and content from a marketing perspective. And I thought that was a great idea, but I really think Carl could deliver on it either.
Especially so quick. And here we are right out of gate, man. Carl's got a he got you on the show. I don't know how he did it.
I'm always paying you. I didn't realize that this would be helpful to Carl. If I had known that I might have been a little more reticent to attend. So apologies.
Apologies for that. We were glad Cassidy that you've gotten your jabs in this early in the podcast. Definitely upset the tone for a very jab full session. I'm assuming.
But yeah, let's dive in Peter. So like, they're like the premise, right? And the way they've come out of the show I'm kind of introducing is topic is like, there are some brands out there that do OK with data and leading their marketing programming or their strategies is, you know, very data or insight driven. It's kind of like half baked though, right?
Okay, so you can think of like gone, right? It's like, all right. There's data that they pull out and they have some posters here and there if you cuss on the sales call, you 30 percent increase and win rates or time should be over 50 percent. There's like Hubspot has some good insights here and there even with finance, right?
We'll leave with insights here and there. But then I then I ran into a card. And I'm like, they have an insights team, and I subscribe to your newsletter, and it's like extremely meaty. I mean, it is filled with very in-depth, what seem to be proprietary insights.
And so I was really curious, says like, this company is taking this very, very seriously, how does it work? Does it even work? Or is it a bunch of fluff, right? Is it even going to help them grow?
And so I'm really excited to hear from you. I'd love to just kick off with, after that premise, like, how did you win this role and justify this? Like, what's the origin story of Peter Walker head of Insights at Carda? Sure thing.
I mean, we could go back to kindergarten and beyond, but I'll keep it a little shorter than that. So head Insights at Carda Insights lives within the marketing function at Carda person foremost. So I consider myself a marketer. And though I played a sort of bridge role between the data teams and the marketing team, like my initial supposition when I'm coming into problems that is from the marketing perspective.
And Insights within Carda, as you mentioned, I think we do it a little differently than most companies. And part of that is because we have access to a pretty amazing data set itself. So Carda is what are we now? 33,000 in counting startups use our cat table platform.
So we get a ton of data from 30,000 startups on everything from what they're fundraising, what their valuations are, who's getting equity compensation stuff like there's just a whole host of things that we can dig into. So the team, as it is at the moment, is quite honestly just me within Carda. There was another wonderful team member who left recently, but we are probably going to expand that moving forward. It is a little much for one person.
But just to get back to your question, this role, this concept was sort of a brainchild between myself and my CMOJ now as an actor. And the initial conception was Carda sits on a ton of data about the private market. We're always being asked questions that people suppose we must know the answers to because we just have access to so many different startups. So it sort of became incumbent upon us to start doing more with those answers.
How do we put them out there in the right way? How do we be helpful to prospects and people have just become aware of us before they become customers? And then how can we turn data itself into a brand and moat for our growth strategies? So that's kind of a broad level of where the idea came from.
And it's kind of grown over the last two years that I've been the company. So that wasn't really the plan. Like you were like just sitting on this data, I'm assuming like most company, what you weren't like is you bring like it takes technical labor to like aggregate the data from your customers and to make it like fairly useful, right? Was that just like there and that was like an accident?
And then you and your CMO just were like, why the heck are we capitalizing on this? Or like was it the opposite? It was built for that reason in the past and then you and your CMO made which chicken or the egg? Yeah, I think it was the latter.
So it was functionally a lot of the data that we're drawing from the underlying models of that have been built by our really wonderful data science team from whom I learned a lot, but I'm actually not a part of that team. Again, I'm sitting within the marketing function. And a lot of the way that we leverage that data is to say, okay, we have all these models and they're incredibly important for our core product. What else can we be doing with the clean data sets that they produce?
And it kind of became the flywheel got started because we kept running into the same questions over and over, which is that take the first big insight from building this function is that there are questions that your customers are asking you all the time. Can you turn those answers into something more systematic? So for us, an example is companies would come to us and they would say, hey, Carter has all these startups on the platform. Can you tell us what their valuations are?
Can you tell us what I should expect as a seed stage company trying to raise a series around? How much money should I try to raise? What's the valuation that I should be looking for? Essentially, what do VCs know on the other side of that table that I don't know as a founder?
And like, how can you level out that conversation for me? So a lot of this stuff was building off of again, the models that had already existed. And then the process, the sort of the technical side on insights is how do we build a repeatable process to produce a lot of different content types very quickly and iterate and get a lot of feedback from the market. So it's been a cool expansion of what we thought was possible with the data.
Peter, you made the sound there's a really key insight in this and you made it sound easy, but I want to go back to it real quick. And that is, you heard a question over and over in the market that you were having asked to answer and you had the data and you decided as a marketing team, let's go answer that question. So my point to you is how did you get that insight? Is it because your marketing team is talking to the market?
Is it the same? You listen to the sales team getting this question over and over? How did you have to drive that insight? And then from there, we can get into like, how did you go conceptualize this idea and then pitch it and sell it internally?
But first question is like, you had to have the insight, you had to hear the market asking this question, how did you hear about it? Yeah. So interestingly, I think a lot of the initial listening process was happening before I joined the company. So I joined in early 2021 and at that time, Carter was growing super quickly and we were just, again, I see about Jane, she came to me, I was working at a smaller startup and then for a COVID tracking project and I was doing a whole host of different things.
But she came to me and she was like, look, we are getting all these questions from our data set and our data science team, it's not the highest value time use for them, right? They should be building underlying models, they should be helping our products work better. It's not like a core function of the data science team, but we get all these questions whenever we talk to customers and where we're talking to them, we're talking to them, we're talking to them, we're talking to them, founder meetups, we're talking to them as they reach out for customer support tickets, like we're talking to them as we do like education sessions a lot of the time with our business development team, like we'll go and talk to the latest cohort of YC startups or tech startups, that kind of thing. So we were talking to them all the time and they've all these questions about our data set.
So when I was brought on, there was already this initial buy in that we were getting these questions too frequently to not act on them. And then really my goal was to get out how to act on them in the right ways and build a system that gives some of that value back to us and making sure that we're benefiting a little bit from putting those answers out into the public. A follow up to that would be then, you have this aha, you and your CMO, Jane. What was the internal selling process to get the buy in?
Was that simple? Did you get a lot of a, wait a minute, we have all this proprietary data and you want to do what? You want to just give it away in the market? How much time was it?
Yeah. As you can imagine, it was not smooth and easy all the time. Certainly there are parts of our business where I think this is a really valid opinion and where you should be pretty guarded about the proprietary data that you have that can be the secret sauce in some cases. But there are a lot of places where functionally what we're selling is orthogonal to the data itself.
So if we were a Bloomberg or a pitch book or something like that where the data is the product, then it would be an interesting idea to put that out in different ways or making it all publicly available. But we're not. We're a cap table provider that does a whole host of other things in terms of compensation management and stuff for startups. So anything that we can do to make startups, one, trust us more and two, rely on us more heavily in those key moments, especially in fundraising, that's a brand payload that's invaluable to Karna.
So making that case across the business, yeah, it took a little bit of time. And I wouldn't say that that's a case that you make once. It's definitely an ongoing conversation. I mean, I was just on a phone call today where we were walking through what parts of our compensation data set makes sense to put out in a public report, what parts of the reserve current clients are like inside the product.
That is probably the conversation I've had most frequently since I joined. And so you just got to be ready to re-explain things and also shift points of view where it makes sense. But it takes a while. You've got to build internal champions over time.
One of the things that's interesting and it's like, I'm hearing you talking, it's a concept that I've thought of. I think a lot of brands that have any amount of proprietary data wrestle with the monetization of that. And I think let me know if I'm off here, Peter, I think one of the misconceptions is there's only one way to monetize something where it's like to gate it and then to sell whatever the data or the insights are. And then free is to not monetize it.
But actually think that's the wrong mindset, right? It's just a direct monetization versus an indirect monetization, right? Because it's probably very difficult to measure it, which is likely some of the friction that you have to deal with in the internal selling is how do we measure this. But it really is indirect monetization of those insights to give it away for free.
Because you know, inevitably, the brand Halo is going to drive pipeline and revenue and trust in the market. Like, I don't know who your competitors are, right? Like, that's good. You want it to be like, if I need cap table management software, Karda, Kleenex, right?
And you've like blocked out with your Halo, a lot of your competitors to where most of the markets likely like me, where it's like that card is probably alone in the space. Whereas your reality is you're probably not. So again, do you buy that where it's like the mindset shift isn't monetization versus not, right? Give it away in fluffy marketing.
It's really like monetization model versus an indirect model. Does that do you buy that at all? Do you feel like that's out? 100%.
That's very close to how we think about it internally. And to your overall point, like we have a ton of competitors, they're all wonderful companies. We're definitely not alone in this space and it's getting more crowded every day. But part of what we think the value of giving away this data that I don't even think that giving away is really the right way to think about it.
So when we put insights out into the public, it rebounds to us and value in a few different ways. So first and foremost, if we are well known and cited frequently within our ideal customer profile of founders, especially early stage founders, that is worth its weight in gold to Karda. So imagine you're in a conversation. There's a group of founders on a WhatsApp thread.
They're talking about their companies. They are helping each other out when they're trying to fundraise, et cetera. And one of those founders drops a report from Karda into that WhatsApp thread and says, hey, you guys check this out. They just released this.
Like we all should be taking a couple of these notes when we go out to fundraise. That's perfect. That's exactly what you want. You want to be in those dark social patterns so that people have this conception of your brand before they ever need your services.
That's really where we're trying to influence people. So I couldn't agree more. I don't think of it as not monetizing. The other distinction that we made is that there's the super basic form of monetization, which is put together a report, have people pay for that report move forward.
That's super easy, but it's also very state and boring and kind of old-fashioned. What we like to think about is, hey, what reports and interesting things that we put out into the public understand the actual feedback, see what gets engagement and what's actually not that useful, and then take the things that have a ton of engagement and either pipe those into the product themselves or offer them in some other different way, be able to calculate or be able to tool, et cetera. That dry can do a little bit more regen or customer affinity work for us. That is driven off of the initial data.
So we almost never think of reports as something that I never want to modify. Reports and graphics and social snippets, those are all awareness mechanisms. And once we get you into the product ecosystem, that's where we can find what's going to be most valuable for you and how to use this data in a hundred different ways. What do you like these, I mean, it sounds like you all do so much brainstorming internally because there's a lot of moving parts here and a lot of things to think through and set this data and do we gate this, do we not gate this, do we put this in the product to really monetize it directly versus, and there's degrees in all of these.
How do you just for the audience, practically work through these decisions internally? Cold huddles with Jane. I think about that, or do you have more of a process of working through different ideas? Because it feels it can be overwhelming to be like, man, there's so many things we can do.
Talk to me about getting a process or framework you all have for working through these decisions as a team. I think the number one thing to know upfront is that there is no perfect process for deciding these things. So you shouldn't let the perfectly be the enemy, the good here. And what's been really advantageous from my experience is to give yourself like a lot of guardrails at first.
So when I came into the car as an example, there were three different businesses that I could have produced a bunch of data for our core capital business, our compensation business, and then our venture capital fund business. All of those are different underlying data sets. You got to get to know the data that's like complex and modeled and all these sorts of things. So I said, okay, I'm going to lead two of these businesses to one side.
But again, I'm not even going to think about it. I'm going to start with the core cap table because that's our biggest business. And even within core cap table, I'm going to call off a tiny slice of the data we have just in valuations. And I'm going to spend the next two weeks digging into everything that I can about those valuations and producing things that could be in public.
I'm not going to put them in public yet. I'm just going to produce graphics, produce narratives about from this data. And then you start putting those things into public a little bit, you start tracking the feedback on them, and then you go deeper with the ones that actually matter. So it's just kind of a laddering up or a lattice approach.
And that has proven really, really, really useful because it does two things. One, you get the pace that cadence that you need, which is iterate quickly. And then two, you get to kind of prove to the other parts of the business, hey, look, in a month's time, we've gotten this sort of feedback on our core cap table. Wouldn't you like that feedback on your compensation business product people in compensation?
Let's have a discussion about what you think the most important parts of that comp data set are and what you're comfortable putting out in public. Those conversations ladder up and build on themselves. But the most important thing to do is don't get overwhelmed by all of the stuff you could do. Just take a tiny slice and go deep on that for a week or two and then repeat the process.
I like that example. It's very clear. You narrow this down, you took a tiny slice, you did some analysis, you kind of figured out, hey, I have something here. When you say put it in the market, what was the thought process you went through to be like, okay, what do we do with this?
Do I just post on LinkedIn? Do I tweet it? Do I blog it? Do I use it?
What was the thought? How do you work through the strategy? At least the initial day one strategy. We have a ton of different channels now, but when I first joined, it was really as simple as I'm going to reserve time on the cart of social calendar every week and I'm going to put it out through a cart of social channel, generally Twitter.
That's how things started. And then we moved very quickly, and the LinkedIn as well, although you all know, LinkedIn has its own problems because you can't post multiple times, they expect to save engagements and all that kind of stuff. And then, you know, as the business continue to grow, and there's a hundred different priorities that are non-data centric that require the social team's time, et cetera, I started putting this stuff out over my personal socials, and now that's kind of another channel for us. So I think one of the hidden benefits that I found from this insights function is you can build personas within your company that become channels in and of themselves for your product.
So, you know, people following me on LinkedIn or on Twitter for this kind of content, and then I get out of each person in those DMs and all sorts of stuff every week, and I can pass them to the right people internally, they can become helpful for case studies, you know, kind of its own bio. So, I think companies should be investing more in creating like a forward-facing talent or thought leaders within their business. They don't always have to be VPs or people in the C-suite, they can just be someone who has a passionate interest about something that your company does. Carl, I think you do a good job of this on LinkedIn already.
Sorry, cast the mean to compliment them. But I think the stuff that you put out on sales makes a ton of sense. And I think sales gets this a little bit more, but you can use it across the board. So, that's been a main channel.
And then you use that channel to build other channels. So, we have a data newsletter now that we point back to all the time. We have webinars and virtual events on data, we're launching two new newsletters that are going to be more specific slices of the data. Like, there's a lot of stuff we can do.
And then we've got big, big plans for later this year to build like one hub to rule all this stuff. So, a ton of channels you can experiment with. Yeah, I just wanted to address that. You know, we actually hired Carl only to talk about sales.
He doesn't actually do any sales. So, he has plenty of time to be on. Interesting. Interesting.
Yeah, that makes sense. Peter, thanks for the compliment. I know that one really burnt Cassidy up. So, I think he's two jobs in and maybe I got one against them.
So, we'll see how I finished it. But, No one's given for it. What I wanted to ask about is measurement. Okay, so a lot of marketers complain.
Sorry marketers. That's like, they can't prove anything and because leadership doesn't get it and work for a CEO who gets marketing and you kind of hear all these takes. And it's like one of the big things that they get asked with is like ROI. So, I'm hearing that you all had a culture to begin with even before you got there of like testing new weird stuff and experimenting and having like this R&D type of approach to iterating on something small and then kind of growing it and letting it ladd us up.
I think it's the name of your framework, the laddest framework. I guess talk to me about what's your advice or how did you go about measurements of effectiveness because you know it's difficult to measure some of these organic strategies or things that are happening in dark social. Yeah, walk us through just like your measurement before you thought about it early days. So, I think one of my strongest held beliefs in this sort of inside space is that if you are being judged on direct MQLs or leads, you're almost certain to fail because there is no way a lot of times to correlate exactly a piece of information that you put out in public leads directly to interest leads directly to that sales demo and you're going out to show you're going out to the platform whatever.
That doesn't happen a lot. But that doesn't mean that this isn't valuable to do. And so, the way that we think about it, the way that I thought about it internally and we try to kind of again build from smaller blocks is you want to build an insights practice so that fundamentally, you have a better understanding of what's happening in your proprietary data and you can answer customer questions. So, for a while there I was actually tracking how many times can I jump in on social and answer a specific question that I see out in Twitter from VCs from founders from startup employees whoever.
How many questions a week can I answer using carto data? That was a nice little like show of proof like hey people are asking these questions we can be valuable here. Beyond that though when it comes to how do you track autoi you can track the basis stuff views and actions is generally how I break it down. So, views of content and actions taken off that content and action might be signing up for a newsletter.
It might be at the very extreme in requesting a sales demo. But usually it's like I want more information from carto about the specific thing that I care about. The other way to measure this is that the other way that I think about the value of an insights function is not just hey you produce a lot of stuff internally but you become sort of a data engine for the rest of your marketing organization. So, can you as the insights function provide amazing stats for sales people to use in nurture emails.
Can you provide decks for your business development team to go and talk with your ecosystem partners for carto that's generally law firms and accelerators. Can you build data that your CEO can use in the next speech that he's giving at X Y or Z event. Like how can you take the data that you understand deeply because you spend times in these data sets and like use it in a sort of a spider web across the business. So, you're getting all these stats mentioned in all these different places.
That I think is partly how you can measure the value. It's like how much value have you provided to other internal teams not just how many needs have you gotten that month. Man, that's a really insightful additional nugget of measurement that I hadn't considered. What is the value of our data to ourselves?
You're creating internal subject matter experts in your flat learning curve. If I come in as a seller like selling coming from something like let's say I got a job at Carta right and so I'm selling to marketers basically for the last seven years of my career to start a founders and talking in the language of cap tables and valuations. That's jarring that's different for me but you have a flat amount that learning curve because I can be a subject matter expert or at least appear to be very quickly because you're feeding that. That's a really just approach to the measurement of value.
That's not a value add that most people would assign to a marketing team. I can't make all of our internal stakeholders including our CEO smarter. You all have just really expanded on really the value of marketing overall. I think it comes from that as you mentioned before it comes to that culture of experimenting within the marketing function.
A lot of that kind of laugh a little bit about find a leader who understands marketing. It doesn't matter but perhaps the conception of marketing can be a little different. Marketing in my view is really just it's about how you speak to customers but also how are you empowering your organization to speak the way that you should be speaking to make sure that they have all the information they need to be the experts that people expect them to be. It's a kind of a hidden pattern within our organization that can really be utilized by insight function.
Last thing I'll say, I see Cassie unmuting so I know he wants to see his burning desire to say something but I'm really like I think as companies or vendors or whatever you want to call us as in the market we often know something that other people don't. That's what makes working with us or taking a meeting off of a cold call. It's like do you know something that I don't? There's no reason for me to take that cold call if you don't know something that I don't or I see the insight.
But it's another level to then use that as a part of the culture building internally. We collectively notice the value that people want to know that need to know to win and you can leverage that now as a none of your competitors which again I can't even name one but one of them are using that as a strategic advantage. I know something you don't is a major strategic lever and there's no doubt that it's why carda is a category dominator. There was a category again I just thought it was carda right so I'll worry of one.
So that's just so fascinating. One thing about sales because obviously I'm on the sales side here and I'll like Cassie has this question like do you feel like your sales how did you get them like the sales people have very skeptical of marketers right and just what how did you get buy in? It's one thing to kind of get buy in up the chain but now cross-departmentally how did you process for getting buy in from sales people to be like hey you should be using this like in your outreach and your cold calls like this will make you more effective like now you have marketers telling sales people how to do their jobs how did you navigate that? Yeah we just don't listen to sales at all and it'll be in more most of their opinions when we can and it's proven part it's gone really well so far obviously not like sales I think one it's again it's one of those conversations that if you're expecting to say it once and how to be that's the last time you talk about it then you're gonna fail this is an ongoing conversation where it's just hey again we slice it down into smaller segments and we say all right sales teams that are wonderful sales teams that's working on our compensation products cartotical very simple the value out of this product is we have a ton of data about what people are paying their new hires come to us and we'll tell you what you should pay that new hire in salary and equity.
Simple pitch makes a ton of sense for people who are hiring a bunch of new candidates as you can imagine it was a really really exploding product last year and it's doing even really really well this year even though they've been down turning startups so when sales people are having that conversation with their first prospects that are sending out email nurtures again it's like what do you know what do you as carto know about compensation that I don't know how can I get interest from that head of people at that mid growth startup who may be looking for ideas about how are salaries trending what is going on with the equity compensation at these startups has it been severely impacted because all the valuations are down how do I think about even more abstract topics like what percent of companies have a leveling structure when they are 25 people big how about 50 people big when do levels and set frameworks of how people grow in through the company when those become actually formalized maybe it's not until a hundred people there's so many cool nuances and because again we have all that data we can be helpful and we can put those into nurtures and we can have salespeople repost their own social and build their own credibility when it comes to why so much of listen to insights versus doing it the wrong way what you need to do is you need to focus on and get one or two salespeople to give your approach a shot say hey help me out here repost this on your socials for the next week or next two weeks or like include this in this nurture and see if it works you know I don't want to tell you how to do your job I just want to provide tools to say if this is working better we can broaden that to a wider and wider group and once you get some internal champions they can be better mouthpieces for you two other salespeople than you could ever be yourself yeah that's exactly how salespeople work I mean it's about you bringing insight and that insight makes me more money because I'm having more conversations I you've definitely won a champion man fascinating if I was one of your competitors because I lack integrity you know what I would do I would just go get your insights I put them on like my own slide deck with my branding I would just use your insights to like go book meetings because again I lack integrity clearly it's like how valuable it is you probably have seen that where like your competitors are like repurpose some of the data that you have I mean that's how valuable it's just fast just kidding I wouldn't do that I don't think we've seen anyone directly repurpose certainly we've seen some outreach but I think this is I think this gets into one of the sort of more opaque parts of an insight function I will say it does work a little bit better for super not you're not to be incredibly established but it's a little bit better for a brand that has enough data sets to like really be digging into as opposed to a super challenger brand who maybe is just getting started like maybe you can set up the systems for building insights then but it works really really well once you achieve a certain scale and that scale threshold is different for every industry I'm assuming but it definitely does help if you've got the corpus of information behind you I have a few things a few directions ago on this but one of them the first one I was gonna actually give Carl some credit here we often talk about it's a battle of non-obvious insights in marketing and sales and Carl went through that on the sales side on the marketing side this is what we talked to customers about what's a non-obvious insight that are going to get people to understand you're the expert and position yourself in a unique way and the reality is most companies we talked to don't know they're happening and now you're sitting on a gold mine of it anything it's how's the rest of the marketing team reacted to it like I would have seen the marketing team like this is awesome I'm gonna put it in every channel it's gonna be in every campaign yeah however did you get pushback really on did you get like why is this insight team getting all the glory and we're doing either has a better good relationship because I assume the potential is massive for your brand yeah smooth sailing not like how's that going I wish there was like you know a more exciting story but it's an awesome relationship from the beginning and it's not so much that we get glory to the other parts of the company going it's more that it was almost to be honest a sense of relief it was like finally we're doing something with this thing that we know we've had and I get more questions from the marketing team every week than the rest of the company combined almost because they are the ones that are close to the customers and they can say oh we'd love to know x y or z about this part of our business so we can have a good example like we would love to start this virtual event with five minutes of like state of the market stuff like what's going on right now so that we can get our everyone who's attended that event which might be about a slightly different subject to just understand hey card has got all of this information about the market and we're just trying to give you a little bit of how you would talk so that you can take that away no matter what you think of the panelists or other things would be forward good like minor example of how the data is used there the other way that we can be helpful to both marketing and data teams so at some point when a company startup gets big enough there exists within Slack or whatever it is like a data request channel and that channel starts to get flooded with all sorts of data requests say can you make me this dashboard hey can you pull this number for me from non data users across the business what insights one of the values one of the ways that I found I could be helpful at the very beginning before we had all these channels was I can just go into that data request channel and I answer questions super quickly because I'm in the data all the time and so the marketers can come to me and I can take something off of the data teams plate and they some of those questions can just go direct to me and I can tell you how many happens today I can tell you what the average blah blah blah is you know and you don't have to waste a data scientist time who's going to just be like I should be building models not digging around and looker so that's another internal sort of product that can be helpful when you're just starting out trying to prove the value of insights that's helpful very helpful okay so I have a case today so what's your like a how do we get this started and what I'm thinking of is we have a client I'm like a name and name Carl and I talked about this client we think it's a massive opportunity to do something like this they're not a competitor to use it to worry probably sitting on a gold-minded data nobody really realizes that except maybe the CEO but maybe not the marketing team how would you start that conversation if somebody came to you and said hey and they listened to I sent this podcast to the marketing team I said you should listen to Peter you're awesome you should do this yeah and they said they want to talk to you like how would you start the conversation like it's assessing what they have or like I don't know turn it over to you I think the first thing that I would ask is over the last call at three to six months what are the top questions that your customers are asking you are they are there questions that your customers are asking you that you know you have the answers to or you think you should if you're say a sales database or whatever you are and that you just don't have the time to expose those answers because the answer to that is yes then you're ready for an insight function for sure the other thing that you can do is it doesn't have to be a dedicated insights function it's very useful for carda because we have such a big scale to have someone in seat who's the only job is to think about all this stuff there's someone on the marketing team that wants to get their hands dirty a little bit with data and we can get into what sort of tooling and experience I think is helpful in this space but if there's a marketer who's kind of data driven and interested in that they can take this on as a product and say hey again give it a lot of real constraints give it a lot of guard reels at first and say we're just going to do a proof of concept we're going to take those top three questions that we think we can answer with our data and we're going to see if that's true we're going to have one marketer go and try to figure out those answers and the process of figuring out those answers will be very instructive because you'll get to see how clean or dirty are these data sets is it stuff that we can pull off the shelf or does it take a lot of data science time is it easy to turn into graphics or do we have to have this whole back and forth with design and everything else like you get into the process steps of this but ideally you can answer one of those questions to begin with prove the value a little bit and then you can sit down for that big strategy meeting and say we want to produce this kind of report quarterly and these kind of things so this part of this is all the fun stuff that comes after that yeah that's strong I appreciate that. Carl you can jump in anytime but I have one follow up you mentioned tools background I'd love to kind of peel that away. Look at your background it's really my mind no accident that you're in this role and so kind of yeah walk us through kind of the history of your experience their persona and profile why it's unique or important for this role and then maybe tooling how to get started the technical. Definitely so let me experience side quick-potted bio I was working at a small startup back east called public relay and what we did was media intelligence so before chat GPT and a lot of natural language processing we would be going in and telling companies hey what's going on with you and your competitors in the media and we had this really cool tagging structure almost like a video game for tagging media concepts within language and when I came there I came as an analyst but quickly got super interested in the data analytics piece so ran a team of that kind of managed our tableau and business intelligence tools and then I got kind of burned out with that and went into product marketing and spent a lot of time building the marketing function there so those two sort of experiences one data analytics one product marketing joined together gave me this view about how data should fit into the marketing world and how marketers should think about talking to their prospects with data and then March 2020 happened everyone was locked in their houses I got on Twitter for the first time which if you're not on Twitter please don't join it's probably better for your mental health if you don't at this point but in my case I got on there and all I did was start building little tableau graphics and very quickly one thing led to another and I got some outreach from this nonprofit that was out of the Atlantic called the COVID tracking project and I got brought on there and ended up helping run their team of data experts and that was like an MBA in this kind of thing because one you needed to produce new data new graphics every day and two those graphics were going to be very heavily scrutinized because it was COVID data in the middle of COVID and at one point we were getting more traffic to our websites in the CDC was today so that experience where you're just kind of in it every single day having to iterate quickly and build systems and that kind of thing that proved invaluable for the card experience which is again a data set that people are very interested in understanding and how do you produce all these graphics and these narratives at that scale so that's a little bit of the background in terms of the tooling there's a lot of different ways to create looking charts out of data mind personally partial to tableau for a couple reasons one I think it's pretty easy to get started with it's tough to master but the getting okay at it doesn't take very long and part of that is that a lot of it's drag and drop so you don't need to write sequel or like have a deep understanding of that although of course if you do write sequel it's much easier and then it allows you to be very visually creative so if you don't like something you just control Z it and try a different chart and that that gives you some more iteration prospects so my workload is a lot of like Google Sheets, Looker, I'm writing sequel, building in Tableau and then finishing it off in Figmour Design Program talking about the flow of one graphic.
Let me ask one question and I'll show it to Carl. Where do your skills stop and the data science team pick up because I assume the head of data science or engineering where that organization sits is we're happy to help you but we have a kind of the day job so you're pretty deep in the analytics side which I'm sure is a huge asset you probably don't need to rely on them but do you ever need to rely on them and kind of what's that discussion like? Absolutely rely on them all the time. I think if you think about it you can sort of envision my still set and role as much more focused on visuals and business intelligence tools on the database layer and then I have some sequel and I can a little more than competence I would say at like massaging these datasets and cleaning them etc but I rely super heavily on our data science team.
Our data team is amazing they're led by Julia King at Carnegie and Cheese Wonderful as well but it's they produce all of these beautiful clean easy to use datasets that are pied into looker or other databases and then I get to play around with all the results of that data and do a little bit more transforming on my end but they do a lot of heavy lifting to make sure that the data that we're pulling out of the product is accurate it's timely it's updated in the right ways it's easy to access like all of that infrastructure stuff is something they handle and I couldn't do my job if they weren't doing that. That's awesome Carl. Yeah it's just such an impressive skill set Peter I mean like you're doing data visually and you're tableau maybe a little sequel and then you're also doing like the design side of this right like you can dig my Photoshop or Illustrator or whatever to kind of polish off whatever the graphics are so I imagine that that is maybe intimidating to the audience so like well I'm not Peter Walker this dude is like a freaking like genius the dude can do a number of things and a very unique experience this compared to the visualization and data production that you were doing with the with the covid stuff like this is probably a cakewalk compared to the intensity of that role. I certainly get I get that strolling online for this.
Yeah I'm sure sure the emotional destruction I'm sure that happened every time you see people like getting upset about your data and stuff I'm sure is like very stressful but you did not want to be in my DMs for about six months there. It got pretty dark. Yeah yeah I'm sure so okay so I'm not Peter Walker I'm just like your regular old little marketer and I'm competent in like Figma obviously design tools and stuff like that like what are the baby steps that you would take if you were me to get started and then I want to close out with two things I think this will nicely segue us into can you walk us through your lattice framework as you take it like baby steps and then I want to close out with what's the future of an insights driven growth look like so baby steps framework future let's do it. Awesome so first and foremost I think you're overstating my confidence a little bit here you know my experience is a bit unique but I think a lot of the players have the basic building blocks of what they need to build an insights function so as you mentioned one of the things that's really useful is some experience or some interest in a design tool like Figma or other design tools the advantage there is that you can generally export you know a graph out of whatever you're building that graph in and you can add the annotations and the lines and the highlights and all the fun stuff in the design program itself and those typically are easier to deal with than data of these programs.
Data days is like the programs are getting better and again I think Tableau is the best of them but one table can be a little bit expensive than two sometimes it's just easier to design in a design center program so don't be scared about moving back and forth between those two things in terms of building charts like generally speaking you can do it anywhere you know you can do it in powerfully you can do it in Google sheets you just get started with basic charts like that and then you know export them into a design program add a little touches of player one of the advantages of working at a company like Carda is we have a wonderful design team that sets the you know how our brand should look and feel for us so I don't have to do a lot of thinking about what colors should I use and what fonts should I use and that kind of thing that's all set for me by the design team so I just get to spend time massaging the data and making it look really pretty within the card has moved to a pretty like striking I think black and white and cool graphic design scene so that's all good if i were a marketer and I had no skills at data one I would probably want to fix that just for my career in general even if it's not an insights so just be familiar with Google sheets is a great place to start if you can get familiar with even if you're living in a Salesforce or HubSpot you're going to export some of that data and play around build some charts in Google sheets that's a wonderful way to begin if you have an EDU email address I think Tableau is free for at least a year and again I find Tableau pretty easy to pick up if not easy to be advanced at so it may be worth your time to spend a little you know a few hours in that as well you can do the secure bloom framework of you know spend 30 minutes on it for 15 or 20 days and if you've gotten to someplace great you know you like it awesome and you hated those 30 minutes every day then you know you can move on but I think you can a lot more marketers can get started building data that is then perhaps think that they have those skills you said words I never thought I'd hear to get I'm a previous HubSpotter but you said like pretty easy to use and get into and you use that in the context of Tableau Salesforce but take a jab there I never heard those words before and I'll cast these you know close to Tableau etc with somebody I'll have a mous yeah yeah his previous experience and yeah battle of the BI tools gets kind of testy sometimes so yeah I apologize if that was I was stepping into a civil war that it already happened oh you're good okay so let's walk into if you've got the the framework Peter that you could walk us through I guess to kind of put the final touches on how do I started with this you have a lattice framework it's what you call the lattice yeah three goes four to six steps and then I want to transition into just talking about where the future of this kind of role conceptually goes sure thing so on the framework side I think one mistake that people might make is they try to build an insights function is they may sit down for a big strategy meeting at the beginning and say oh we want to put out an annual report on this sort of quarterly 20 page PDF on that where that's usually those conversations are more informed by internal needs than customer needs so my approach which I think kind of again ladders up a little bit better or I call it lattice is just to take a really small subset of the data available to you so say we were at GONG and we were putting out data on the last 90 days of sales calls great within that 90 day data set we want to build a graphic or an insight from that data set daily if we can for two weeks so we get 10 to 14 things if you can publish it on your social if your company's full with that that's the best way to do it or their own social wherever but like you want to try to publish these things in public and then just take a pulse and say which of these are most engaging which were most popular which got a lot of comments which got no comments all that stuff then you take this stuff that was helpful and you dig deeper into that so maybe the graphics that you put out about times of sales calls like time of day or time a week that nobody cared about that but they really cared about the density of certain words in those sales calls cool let's do some interesting stuff about words and the things you should say and shouldn't say then you can combine those really popular items into either a one sheet or a downloadable thing or a you know a mini report whatever it is that you can create off of those let's call it five things that really hit and then you can put that on your website and have it be a lead magnet to start with and then you can once you have that proof of concept you can then wire up to the next small subset of data or you can look over your strategy and say I think this was interesting enough that people would want it on a recurring basis one of the things that I found is a lot of people think that when you produce a report you're somehow committed to doing it every quarter until the world ends after that whereas you really shouldn't be you should put it out and if it's great for that one time awesome and maybe it doesn't need to be recurring what happens is you box yourself in with all these calendars I need to create this thing every quarter until time ends and you just find yourself having less and less time to do that discovery day work so that's a little bit of the lattice approach that we took it as I first joined yeah I think a lot of teams I mean that last piece was really insightful right like you feel like you're married to something for a long period of time and it squeezes like not only the joy out of it right emotionally but it just squeezes the vaguers night you begin doing tasks because they feel like a half-year was opposed to like I'm just my customers and these are the questions they're asking and these are the things we're seeing results in so yeah it's just a jump in there though like one of the interesting parts too is and this is something I struggle with a lot of the time we sometimes feel as marketers that we put this out into the marketplace if we keep saying it people are going to get so bored with us we're really they didn't hear it the first time you know like repetition actually matters so if you and the opposite is also true like if you think that this quarterly report like the world is depending on it and if it doesn't come out of the quarter you're gonna get a hundred hate emails like most of the time people are probably not thinking about it that much and you can do a little bit more experimentation yeah I love that I want to add uh ask a question on that now just I like this idea of small bison information just put it out you don't have to make it recurring yeah test the market see what you get feedback on in your journey any surprises along the way where you're like man this is gonna crush and it didn't or this doesn't seem very strong and it crushed yeah and that's probably the value of your loudest approach because you're not depending on a big quarterly report to nail it yep you're doing this in small incremental chunks and kind of learning and iterating but like anything you have surprising yeah I mean every time I put out a graphic on LinkedIn you know I get my books and dreams crushed when it comes back and on like so you know it's a tough world to live in but yeah that sounds like Harold's post yeah that sounds exactly like Cassidy's posts I feel both of your pain I hope you both get that first like pretty soon I know it's coming so just keep at it I think that there's been multiple times where I put a lot of time and effort into a set of graphics and like four people like them and I go back and I get sad about it and whatever then the next day you're putting out more stuff the stuff that's really big that I wasn't expecting it'll be one of the things that seems to do better than other types of content when I put it out there is any location based up so like not just segmenting by a stage of company but segmenting by location and being able to actually use maps and like geographics like that's been one set of insights that just prove really popular people I should have expected people love comparing cities to one another but that kind of thing generally gets a lot more pick up of you know our compensation reports the last summer got a ton of pickup and a lot of that was from like local Axios outlets being interested in how it land out compared to San Francisco and stuff like that so that was a cool learning that is a insightful location yeah it makes sense it makes sense any one more question let's get to the future any thoughts in the future of combining data sets with other companies already feel like you got enough to work on within carna one like yeah it's a question that comes up pretty frequently or at least on occasion in certainly I think it's definitely worth exploring with the right partners I think finding exactly those right partners are is sometimes difficult then you're faced with two problems one just a natural set of competitors or competitiveish products and how closely do you want to align and that kind of stuff but even for non-competitive products like carna and credit card for instance it's a start-up credit card that could be interesting because you could see like what are you spending on payroll versus what are you spending on non-payroll items like software and stuff it's just that typically those collaborations take about three times more effort than you assume they will and it sometimes it becomes like you get kind of caught in the process and then that slows you down so we haven't done it yet but I would definitely not move it out for the future yeah that makes sense you know as we try collaborations even at refined labs it's like there's a lot more time investment a lot more logistics it's like as a juice worth the squeeze sometimes on that stuff it's not something you're the I hate to say this but like especially when you're the dominant brand and like the other brand like there's not a ton of value maybe for you like yeah there's another kind of brand that's sort of drafting off of your audience so I find that those collaborations work best there's the mutual value is like equally weighted you know what I'm saying and that's like started credit card that just started yesterday and has really no value at the carda is trying to draft off of your audience etc so there's a lot of like little political dynamics to that I think kill a lot of those partnerships or the math just doesn't the economics just doesn't make sense yeah no no no cool Peter take us home man you have got the carda data desk yeah yeah you're sitting here you us two questions we'll close out what's the future you think of like this function where do you feel like it can go and how's carda getting there and kind of leading the way and talking a little bit about the carda data desk I think is what you're you're calling it yeah so could talk for a long time about what the future of the function is I think as a tiny thought experiment here we've all seen and read about and played with all of the generative AI tools and everything and there's sort of hysteria about what it's going to do the content and our marketers have a job and everything I don't believe a lot of that but what is probably true is that it will be 10 times easier to produce mediocre level content so if you have an insights function you can be somewhat insulated from that given you have proprietary things to say that are not going to be replicable by anything that everybody else has so as a way to stand out I think that insights will actually become more valuable as all these tools get incorporated into flows so that's projection a little bit for the next five years perhaps I've died as one but I do believe it in terms of carda insights one of our big products this year is to build what we're calling the carda data desk and that is the idea that instead of pushing out all these reports we're not going to get away from reports entirely but instead of pushing out things on a set basis we're going to build live interactive data on the web that anyone can go and access and play around with and filter and slice and watch the data move to like dance through it themselves so hopefully the first big iteration of that is live on site for a late summer for us but once we have that that can become this hub of interest and attention from which we can build all sorts of growth experiments that other kind of I'm sure refined is super familiar with so that's our big push for the next four months five months or so and then once it's live I'm sure I'll see both of you book market very quickly absolutely I mean one thing that I appreciate about your strategy is that like you go big or you don't do it you know like the carda data desk is not just going to be like a blog you know with like service you know like you're going all the way I'm sure investing like a healthy amount of dollars like because that's very difficult to do like on a CMS like now we're gonna be able to be able to play with the data etc like that's not a light lift but you've done such a good job Peter internally of like proving this out that it feels like you have like carte blanche to like do some stuff that is weird and wild and like nobody else like how you catch up to that your competitors they're years if they wanted to and potentially hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars especially if you factor in headcount away from doing that so to go back to generative AI it's like this is a moat this is a strategic moat for carda that is not passable at least anytime soon and by the time any competitor gets close your moat will be you know 50 feet deeper hundreds a lot of alligators at it's the most validators for sure archers on the top of the wall yeah that's the point but hidden in that answer though is like this would not have been possible for me to request or think about when I first joined it's all about that laddering up strategy so that when you start asking for big things and you start asking for a ton of time from your web team for instance and they they have a hundred other priorities like you can prove you can point to wins in the past and say I'm not gonna waste anybody's time here this is worth doing yeah you've built up an enormous amount of like political equity for yourself inside and you're you're taking a line of credit out on that I mean that's right still set in and of itself that I'm sure we can talk about some other time but um I'm good Peter this has been fascinating Cassidy anything else before you close us out No you just get crushed at Peter this is super helpful I mean the framework the starting small the detail you shared it's gonna be very valuable for the audience I think you're carl and I talked about this a lot your point at the end was subtle but immensely valuable at a macro level and that is like proprietary insights in a world of generative AI will be the differentiator and you guys are sitting on a massive amount of that and you're taking advantage of it so well done appreciate the time Jared yeah this is fun guys hope you do it again soon absolutely all right everybody that was latest episode of stacking growth Carl and I are out