How to Build a $100M Growth Engine: Lessons from Wispr Flow & Superhuman | Matt Swulinski

Matt Swulinski: 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.

Matt Swulinski: I say there's the core three of any acquisition engine. You have Meta, Google and Lifecycle. And obviously like your site and all the rest is is in the middle because you have your 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 I add in lifecycle 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, 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.

Matt Swulinski: 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.

Matt Swulinski: if you look at ecom uh there are companies like triple whale and elevar that have existed for many years and what those tools do is triple whale is essentially a mutual exclusivity platform that tells you okay you add a pixel to your website it's out of the box you plug in all your ad spend and then it tells you because there's usually overlap right if you run meta ads in Google they're double counting right... For SAS, completely different world cuz you have to have an engineering team that builds this from scratch. Right? When it comes to analytics, there's a DB, there's a BI layer... there is no out of the box SAS that fills that and that that's why all of the companies that struggle don't do that first that you have the right martekch stack to understand if we're spending what is actually moving the needle because the platforms won't tell you because you have the wrong setup for conversion tracking you don't have measurement and you're spending into the air. And I'd say 90% of companies don't do that as a first step. Before you spend your first scent, have everything set up.

Matt Swulinski: If you look at ecom uh there are companies like triple whale and elevar that have existed for many years and what those tools do is triple whale is essentially a mutual exclusivity platform that tells you okay you add a pixel to your website it's out of the box you plug in all your ad spend and then it tells you because there's usually overlap right if you run meta ads in Google they're double counting right and then life cycle is also triple counting at that point...For SAS, completely different world cuz you have to have an engineering team that builds this from scratch. Right? When it comes to analytics, there's a DB, there's a BI layer...That's just like a massive headache...there is no out of the box SAS that fills that and that that's why all of the companies that struggle don't do that first...I'd say 90% of companies don't do that as a first step. Before you spend your first scent, have everything set up.

Matt Swulinski: creative is everything in today's environment where uh and like people have you know heard this buzzword thrown around. There's an update in meta that was called Andromeda that essentially changed the targeting algorithm where the creative is the targeting. So what meta did is stop telling me in audience settings in the campaigns who people are. we're going to analyze the creative and based on who we know you're trying to target, we will find those people for you. So essentially that removed like all the media buyers that were like tinkering campaigns and had strategies of how to do it that went out the door and their whole job had to be creative strategy... if you, let's say you have 100K meta budget, you probably need at least 400 to 500 new creatives a month. Otherwise, you're going to plateau. You're going to get outco competed.

Matt Swulinski: There's an update in meta that was called Andromeda that essentially changed the targeting algorithm where the creative is the targeting. So what meta did is stop telling me in audience settings in the campaigns who people are. We're going to analyze the creative and based on who we know you're trying to target, we will find those people for you. So essentially that removed like all the media buyers that were like tinkering campaigns and had strategies of how to do it that went out the door and their whole job had to be creative strategy... If you, let's say you have 100K meta budget, you probably need at least 400 to 500 new creatives a month. Otherwise, you're going to plateau.

Matt Swulinski: I'm looking for that. But they don't necessarily have to be the best in the world historically. If they're AI native or a systems thinker and can deconstruct what makes their job hum, that person plus experience will out compete someone that just has experience and is not an AI native... To me that's being able to step back from let's say a task that is a part of my job being able to take one degree of separation from the task itself and say in my role what are all of the moving pieces that essentially I need to do on a day-to-day basis what are the inter relationships, where's the boring admin, where's the reporting, what's all of that. And being able to map that out and understand how your job as a system actually works, because then you can actually say, okay, I can apply an agent or AI to this part and now I can focus on this higher leverage part of my job.

Matt Swulinski: Now, I'm looking for that. But they don't necessarily have to be the best in the world historically. If they're AI native or a systems thinker and can deconstruct what makes their job hum, that person plus experience will out compete someone that just has experience and is not an AI native... to me that's being able to step back from let's say a task that is a part of my job being able to take one degree of separation from the task itself and say in my role what are all of the moving pieces that essentially I need to do on a day-to-day basis what are the inter relationships, where's the boring admin, where's the reporting, what's all of that. And being able to map that out and understand how your job as a system actually works, because then you can actually say, okay, I can apply an agent or AI to this part and now I can focus on this higher leverage part of my job... if you ask a lot of people that, it turns out they don't really understand their job.