I speak with Yuriy Timen who is Head of Growth & Marketing at Grammarly. We discuss how Grammarly has grown from a small paid for product used by students to a widely available web app used by 10 million people. It’s Grammarly’s ambition to be everywhere people write. And this ambition certainly comes through in this discussion. We talk about SEO, product marketing, display advertising, user retention and more. This is a fantastic opportunity to learn more about Grammarly’s rise to popularity and the marketing tactics they used to get there.
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Last 5 questions:
What’s your best piece of marketing advice?
I would say don’t sit or don’t rest on your laurels. It’s such a rapidly evolving space that, you have to innovate or you’re going to cease to be relevant. I like to use the analogy, and some people have heard me use it before of oil wells. Think about your existing marketing channels as existing oil wells that you’re drilling to sustain your community, if you will. But the problem is that you don’t know how deep those oil wells are. It’s very easy to just fall into complacency and keep drilling these oil wells, but before you know it, you’re going to hit rock bottom, quite literally.
That’s why it’s important to split your time and diversify your time between drilling existing oil wells and looking for new oil wells. So, looking for new channels, testing into new channels is analogous to essentially drilling for new oil wells. So, that would be my biggest piece of advice.
Can you recommend a book to our listeners?
More recently, I’ve been reading books that are not directly connected to growth and even business. There are two that come to mind; World Order by Henry Kissinger, which talks about history of the world and society and the role that superpowers and decision making has played in world order. There are a lot of parallels there that you can bring into the business world. If you think about your company as being essentially a sovereign nation, and there are a lot of parallels there that can inform your decision making.
Another one is Extreme Ownership, which is written by former Navy SEAL, forgot his name. But that’s, again, about leadership and how there are parallels between the military world and the business world. So, a lot of good takeaways there as well.
What software tool couldn’t you live without?
I would say Asana. I rely on the productivity management tools quite a bit. Asana is definitely something that helps me both in my professional and personal life, in terms of staying on top of things, being accountable, being reliable.
What’s your favourite example of a marketing campaign?
I was thinking about that Matt because you floated that by me. There is nothing that comes to mind, and I didn’t want to force anything. I think the main reason is that it’s not something that I pay attention too much. I don’t really think about marketing or growth successes as being driven by campaigns. I think it’s driven more by sustainable strategies and rapid innovation. To be honest, there’s no campaign that really comes to mind just because it’s deep in my mind works when it comes to looking at growth successes.
Which other podcasts do you listen to?
That’s another one that I … I’m actually not very big on podcasts to be honest. No disrespect. Most of my information, I still consume through text as funny as it is. I read a ton. Even all of my books today are physical paper printed books. I don’t even do E-readers, which is an odd thing nowadays.
Transcription:
Matt Byrom:
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Marketing Strategies Podcast. Today, I’m joined by Yuriy Timen, who is head of growth and marketing at Grammarly. Yuriy has been with Grammarly for six and a half years, so he’s been and center of the company’s incredible growth.
Grammarly started as a tool for students. They’ve built a loyal following and iterated and iterated on their product. Today, they’ve had over $10 million and counting of their popular grammar-checking Chrome extension, and they’ve recently raised $110 million to supercharge that growth even further.
I’m excited to learn the tactics Yuriy and his team have used to move the needle on that growth, acquire new users and keep users going back for more. So, let’s dive right in.
How are you doing today, Yuriy?
Yuriy Timen:
Doing fantastic, Matt. Thanks for having me.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. It’s a real pleasure to have you on today. I appreciate it very much. In your own words, tell us what Grammarly does and what problem you solve for your users.
Yuriy Timen:
Sure. I’d be happy to. I think the problem that we’re solving is a universal problem, and that’s the challenge of communication; how do you communicate in written form, but, eventually, beyond that, what you really mean. The world that we live in today is very complex. There are a lot of relationship nodes. You communicate with different folks from different walks of life, with different context. You do it through email. You can do it through social media, through SMS, etc, etc. Many people look at your communication effectiveness as a sign of intellect or competency, etc. So, there’s a lot in writing and being able to communicate more effectively, and that’s where Grammarly comes in.
Grammarly is essentially a digital writing assistant that’s already, today, used by millions of people every day to make their communication clear, effective and mistake-free. Grammarly essentially helps ensure that your writing is not only accurate, but also more compelling and easier to read, all in an effort to help you accomplish your goals more effectively.
Matt Byrom:
It makes people look good with their writing, so who wouldn’t like that?
Yuriy Timen:
Absolutely. Yep.
Matt Byrom:
I’ve been a user of Grammarly for a while. I love the product, and how many users does Grammarly have now? When I was researching, I found that the most recent status is like 6.9 million daily active users, but that seemed a little out of date on the site that I saw. Is that accurate or is there been a bit of growth since then?
Yuriy Timen:
There’s been quite a bit of growth. I don’t believe we’ve released anything publicly since that 7 million daily active user number, but our growth has not exactly slowed down, so, at some point in the near future, we may provide an update there, but, yeah, we sort of continue to be one of, if not, the most downloaded and popular Chrome extension, but our product, of course, spans many different interfaces and environments. It’s not just the Chrome extension. It’s Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Edge extension. It’s the mobile keyboard that we release in late 2017 available for iOS and Android.
Many of our users use more than one product, but, as you could imagine, the real active user number is probably much higher than the 7 million we talked about a little while back.
Matt Byrom:
You guys are aiming to be in every space where somebody would write effectively. Is that your aim to be in all those locations to help people in every way that they might write some text?
Yuriy Timen:
That’s exactly correct, Matt. Ubiquity is something that’s … It’s a very foundational pillar to what we’re looking to accomplish. We do absolutely aim to be everywhere where people write, where they create content, where they communicate. You’ll notice, if you were to look at the timeline of our product development, you would see that there is a very concerted effort to expand our reach and basically help people in more places.
Matt Byrom:
The company has been going nine years. You’ve been with the company six and a half years. What position was Grammarly in when you joined?
Yuriy Timen:
When I came on board, Grammarly was both already very successful, but also a small fraction of what it is today. The company was bootstrapped for the first like seven years of its existence, seven and a half years, so, when I came on board, it was already a fairly successful business, growing at pretty attractive rates, profitable, so being able to kind of fund its growth. Most of the users at that time were from academia, I would say, maybe 60 to 70%. We have some business users, but a lot were students and professors and educators.
The team was probably, I want to say, 15 to 20 people. The entire team was based in Kyiv, Ukraine, which is where the company was founded. I came on board, and actually the CEO and I opened up our San Francisco or US office.
Matt Byrom:
Then what was your agreement there? You came on as head of growth and your agreement was to find channels and ways to grow Grammarly as the product grew. Is that right? Am I right there?
Yuriy Timen:
Yeah. I came on as head of marketing. This is early 2012, while I was actually consulting for Grammarly for a couple of months prior to coming on board full time, but, say, late 2011, early 2012. Growth was not exactly a thing at the time. It wasn’t like the sexy space. I came on as head of marketing, but always look at my charter as grow Grammarly, grow our user base, grow our bookings by any means necessary. Yes, a lot of it was channel-based, but very quickly started collaborating very closely with product to run experiments, to ship features that we believe will drive growth for the company.
Matt Byrom:
So was your growth quite product focused in that instance, creating the types of features that you expected the users might want or need and then write about them in an aim to actually grow the business through product?
Yuriy Timen:
You know when I think about Grammerly’s growth trajectory, I think at different points in time, different aspects or different factors contributes more to growth while others contribute less. Let me kind of expand on that. I think in those early days when I came on board, there was already a larger addressable market for that iteration of the product that we weren’t reaching at the time. We saw a huge opportunity in just doubling down on our acquisition efforts. So sure there was always product development but a lot of that growth in those early days when I came on board in those first couple of years was very much channel and scale driven. So let’s launch on more channels. Let’s optimize them. Let’s build the best possible funnels. Let’s bring in people and experts to drive different acquisition channels because there was a lot of opportunity that we were leaving on the table even with that iteration of the product if that makes sense.
Matt Byrom:
So talk to me about which channels they were and how you actually went about that. What was the first step, your first channel that you looked in to and how did that go.
Yuriy Timen:
I would say where our path may be a little bit unique. When I first started working with Grammarly, I mentioned it was in a consultant capacity. I was brought on board to do like a three or four month engagement especially getting an affiliate program off the ground or performance marketing program off the ground; I did that in a consultant capacity. When I joined full time, my first move was to basically find somebody to drive that affiliate program because we proved it out, we were successful, it was profitable, strong ROI. I brought on an affiliated marketing manager to drive that and then I turned my attention to other existing channels that were being managed by agencies at the time. We brought things in house one by one, namely search and display. Brought search and display in house, hired somebody to drive that. Then we brought in our email marketing in house; hired somebody to do that.
That’s where we found ourselves finally in a position where we were managing all of our court channels in house and form there on we just started expanding, testing into different channels applying learnings from the channels that we were already successful in, looking for some similarities. Trying to approach channel expansion on an expected value basis; what is the potential reach and potential impact of a channel we’re considering, what is the level of effort to get started on there and what is the level of certainty that we will be successful. The level of certainty was primarily informed by channels where we had been successful in the past. So, that’s roughly how we approach channel expansion in those early days.
Matt Byrom:
That’s really interesting. What interest me quite particularly, I was speaking with Andre from Canver last week and he said that what they did it’s quite similar to what you say how you approach your growth where they look at channels and then hire a person to drive the area. The way they looked at it was that each area is almost like a mini start up and that person is the entrepreneur and they can drive growth or they can drive that channel or that area in any which way that they feel is most effective and test and experiment in that area. It sounds like there are some similarities there.
Yuriy Timen:
I think it’s pretty typical when you’re launching and I actually listened to a small part of that podcast with Andre this morning. I think its pretty common for any head of marketing, head of growth who’s laughing that function to grow the function in that fashion. It’s pretty typical that you go in as an individual contributor, you try to gain traction in a given channel, prove out, validate the hypothesis that this is big enough for you to hire somebody into that role and then do that. But eventually hopefully you build a really strong bench of performance marketers where you’re not the only one who’s validating new areas where you have to make hires. You have other people, other strong performers who are exploring different tunnels and if something catches fire, you sort of figure out whether it makes sense to hire somebody dedicated into that role to drive it further.
Matt Byrom:
That makes sense totally as well. What were some of the early ones that you had that gave you confidence in certain areas?
Yuriy Timen:
The Grammarly of 2012, 2013 was very different from the Grammarly of today in a variety of ways but the two that are important to your important are: Grammarly was just web-based application. There was no extension, there was no plug in of any time. To use Grammarly, you actually have to be on the Grammarly.com domain; it was like a web-based editor. The second thing is, we did not have a free product. Today, we kind of employed the premium model but at the time we just had a credit card gated free trial. But even in those early days, we saw that the product had a very strong affinity and following. We have really strong conversion rates from visit to free trial. We went from free trial to premium subscriptions. We had pretty decent retention at the time and even then we had a pretty high price point and it seemed to be working. I think that price point coupled with our retention is what helped us succeed in a lot of acquisition channels. Also, those acquisition channels were less competitive than they are today. We definitely were first movers in a lot of places like with sponsored content with some new beta features with google. That was actually one thing that I probably say made us pretty successful was having a very … obviously the Google Ecosystem is massive; it’s YouTube, it’s Gmail adds, it’s google search display etc. They’re frequency releasing beta features.
So cultivating a close with our Google account team allowed us to get access to a lot of beta targeting features that weren’t available to other advertisers and the Google team knew us to be very experimental in that regard. We would like jump on any beta features available to try to kind of get a leg up on the competition. That actually served us really well because we got a lot of early access. Yeah we had significant skew but that wasn’t the only reason; we were also just very willing to experiment. There was like no red tape. If the Google team brought something to us and said, “Hey here’s this new targeting method we’re piloting” we wouldn’t have to go get approval, we would just jump on it. Allocate budget to it and test it. Eventually of course, that feature, if it’s successful, gets released to everybody and then our competitive advantage gets wiped out. Being able to do that repetitively I think served us well in the early days.
Matt Byrom:
That sounds like a dream really, to be integrated with Google in that sense so that you can get beta functionalities and have that competitive advantage. I guess they’ll be clearly less competition for that sort of targeting. If it’s a price per click or something like that then you’re in the driving seat really I guess.
Yuriy Timen:
Yep.
Matt Byrom:
I took a look on similar web and obviously we’re diving into the current now. It says that 60% of your traffic currently comes from direct but the next biggest and obviously the most significant driver of traffic is search. Is that fairly accurate? Direct, obviously you have a strong and loyal following but significantly acquisition seems to come through search.
Yuriy Timen:
I think both search and direct are very meaningful channels for us. I don’t have the numbers at the top of my head as far as how they rank but you can imagine … I would say that direct especially took top very meaningfully in the last two, two and a half years or so. I think that’s where our brand recognition, brand awareness and the quality of our brand awareness really spiked. Plus as you would imagine a lot of the paid advertising that you do over time, it compounds and creates quite a brand lift. The fact that you’re seeing direct as being a pretty meaningful driver for us is correct. Yeah I could speak to that. It’s influenced by a couple of things. It’s influenced by the breath, the depth and the scale of advertising that we do but also by name and brand recognition that we’ve been able to achieve.
Matt Byrom:
I also took a look on our ahrefs accountant to see a little bit of where I guess that search traffic … I guess we’ll come back to the direct again in a moment. You know you’re top pages are explanation of common in a moment, but your top pages are explanation of common English language mistakes such as who and whom and affect versus effect, really interesting, probably very commonly searched for phrases. It seems like it’s been a perfect strategy for you guys to actually write these explanations of these commonly mispronounced terms, but more so what was particularly interesting is that you’re creating not just an explanation of how to use who and whom or affect and effect, but it’s actually you’re creating a lovely looking page with very nicely split up text, clear examples, great graphics to support, and so many instances GIFs, examples of that phrase being written in a sentence as a GIF, and in many instances as well, video.
It’s like you’re not just creating an explanation of something, you’re actually creating what I would consider a phenomenal explanation of something. I guess what I’m leading to with this question is, that many people talk about SEO and tell me that to be ranked number one, you have to create the best page on a particular search term. I’m just wondering what you think about that?
Yuriy Timen:
I wish that were the case. Unfortunately, I mean let me put it this way. Unfortunately, it is not the case today that best content wins, and I know this firsthand. Why? Well, Google is incredibly sophisticated and continuous to get more and more sophisticated with SEO, but it still falls short and there are a lot of bad actors out there where you’ll see crappy content. Maybe it’s temporarily, but sometimes that temporary means like a year plus where you’ll see kind of suboptimal content being ranked pretty high up there.
So, we pursue the strategy of producing the best quality content that we can really stand behind that’s representative of our brand regardless of the outcome. For us, it’s important. We know that our content is not going to always win in the SEO world unfortunately, because there are lot of … Okay, I won’t call them bad actors, but there are a lot of participants competing for the same keywords that have less to lose. They’re okay risking being penalized or they have other intentions in mind. Unfortunately, many of them outsmart Google at least in the short term.
We don’t get caught up in that. That’s not the kind of a competition that we want to engage in. So, we’re not really pursuing number one position at any cost. We’re just using good SEO fundamentals and producing the best content, content that we’re proud to put out there because we understand that it represents every page on the grammarly.com domain. Every ad creative that we run anywhere represents our brand in a very integral and intimate way. So, we want to make sure that we put quality out there.
Matt Byrom:
The content you’re creating is quite phenomenal in many circumstances. How do you actually decide what content to create? What goes in the content calendar? I notice you’re creating a couple of articles a week on the blog.
Yuriy Timen:
I’m going to do my best to speak to that. We have a phenomenal content team and a head of content marketing that drive our strategy and editorial production forward, but at the end of the day, it all comes from strategy. It all comes from what is the message that we’re looking to get out there and who are we looking to reach? Today, we’re focusing a lot on knowledge workers and business professionals. That’s where we’re directing a lot of our product focus, a lot of our acquisition focus, and a lot of our content focus as well. So, that’s kind of point A.
Point B, we’re looking to develop this narrative of how it’s not about writing with perfect grammar, and it’s not about writing error free for its own sake, but it’s about the integral connection between being a better writer, equal in being a more effective communicator, equal in getting ahead, getting the results and the outcomes, and achieving the goals that you set out to achieve. I think a lot of people, many of us don’t really associate … We think of good writing as something that you’re supposed to do well at school, and then when you get out into the real world it ceases to matter, and we couldn’t disagree more with that. So, we’re really focusing our efforts and content to really create that connection, better communication means a better you. It means better outcomes.
So, even if you’re not an intrinsically invested writer, here are all these reasons why you should care about writing more effectively. Maybe it’s that promotion that you care about. Maybe it’s peer recognition. Maybe it’s getting a raise. Maybe it’s getting a new job. Maybe it’s improving your relationship with your manager, etc., etc. So, you’ll notice a lot of our content tries to get at that.
Matt Byrom:
You say that you’re focusing a bit on the business area at the moment. How do you define the differences between the content that you create for, say the consumer market or non-business users to business users?
Yuriy Timen:
To date, not a ton. When I say that we’re focusing on business users, we’re focusing our content on the end users primarily, and whether those end users are business professionals who are subscribing to Grammarly on their own, or if they’re business professionals who are using Grammarly as part of a business account that their employer had purchased. The content is largely the same. It’s pretty consistent. It’s around how to write more effective emails. How to make sure that you get the responses that you’re looking for? How to create more successful sales pitches? How to write a more effective resume, etc.
I think eventually, especially as we ramp up our business product and business services, like we recently just about a year ago launched Grammarly Business which is Grammarly for teams, you have sort of this two personas. You have the end user, and then you have the administrator of the account who may or may not be a Grammarly user themselves. So, now you’re talking about, “Okay, well, how should we be communicating to the administrator of the account who’s investing hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to procure these Grammarly licenses? How do we talk to them differently that we may talk to the end user who’s just getting a seat on one of those Grammarly Business teams?” That’s where the content may vary slightly where you talk about the benefits of improving your team’s communication. How you as a manager or as a lead should care about improving your team’s communication? That’s where I see there being room for some unique content.
Matt Byrom:
Absolutely. It sounds like it’s a very interesting and exciting time for you at the moment, almost sounds like this is the third phase of Grammarly growth really, where you’ve got the student application in your earlier days. You then changed to Premium and had your Chrome extension, which has exploded your consumer growth. Now, you’re moving into business with Grammarly for business. Does that fit accurately or does that feel like how it actually feels at the moment?
Yuriy Timen:
We knew that ultimately for us to reach our ultimate goal, and our ultimate goal is to have everybody in the world who communicates in English use Grammarly because we believe that we can truly help them live better lives, and that’s north of two billion people around the world today. We knew for us to reach that type of scale, it’s going to need to be a combination of having a strong consumer brand and having a deep penetration within businesses. As far as the sequence of how to get there, we chose the approach of focusing on building a powerhouse of a consumer brand, and of course, those things can happen in parallel.
About a year ago, is when we really felt like it was time. We had already enough of a penetration in the consumer market, just start going after businesses. What I mean by that is the likelihood is pretty high now that when we reach out to a business, or when a business is exploring some solution like this, they’re already going to have people in their offices, in their teams using Grammarly, and those can become our strong advocates for businesses to adopt it, but to get to that point you got to reach a certain scale within a consumer market.
Matt Byrom:
I would say lovely position to be in what your approach in businesses and certain percentages. People in the business are actually already using Grammarly and actually could be using it more effectively as a team. So, I can see that, that’s a natural next step for you guys.
Yuriy Timen:
Yup.
Matt Byrom:
Okay. If we were to take a bit of a step back and we’re to look at all the different channels you used. We talked about SEO, paid search experiments, and advertising. We haven’t talked about, but I know you use social affiliates. What would be the most successful channel for you over a long term growth with Grammarly?
Yuriy Timen:
Given that we’ve been around for a while and I specifically have been here for quite some time, I think different channels have different trajectories and different growth curves. A different points in our history, different channels really carry the workload. So, I would say that I can point to a couple of channels. I can point to search and display as being two strong stables for us. Probably in the early days, they were our predominant channels, sometimes almost single-handedly driving growth for the company. Today, they’re still very, very meaningful but we’re a lot more diversified.
I think one of the latest channel successes for us has been video. Over the last couple of years, you probably see our presence on YouTube has increased quite a bit. We’re doing a lot of TV advertising and just in general doing more of that top of the funnel advertising, maybe like more brand-focused advertising but still being able to measure ROI on it and feeling confident that it’s backing out. So, those are two channels that I would point to.
Another channel that I think is less of an acquisition channel but incredibly important to Grammarly is lifecycle marketing and email in general, especially when you talk about the nature of our product where most users will install a free extension, and they will live in their browser. That provides an incredible opportunity for us to supplement that product experience with triggered emails, nurture campaigns, and also messaging within the extension itself. So, when I think about lifecycle, I think that’s a huge, huge part. Our investment in lifecycle was a huge, huge part why we have really strong upgrade rates from free to premium and really strong user retention.
Matt Byrom:
That’s really interesting. What are you using to facilitate your lifecycle? Is it something that you’ve built into Grammarly, or are you using a marketing automation tool?
Yuriy Timen:
To date, we’ve used the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. We’ve been using them for probably about four years or so. So, that’s sort of been the tool of choice, but it’s something that we always or continuously revisit especially now that we have … There are full-fledged mobile product in the form of the mobile keyboard. We’re going to be looking for ways to build out a more sort of multi-touch, multi-device, or cross-device rather lifecycle strategy. So we’ll see, we may supplement the Salesforce Marketing Cloud with some other solutions.
Matt Byrom:
So like push notifications, and that messages, and things like that?
Yuriy Timen:
Yup, yup.
Matt Byrom:
Obviously, it sparked my interest when you talked about video so passionately. My business Wyzowl is a video production company. We create animated explainer videos, and I know a bunch, you’ve created a lot of videos, a bunch of your articles include video to supplement the message and learn things. How have you particularly found that video has been successful for you, and in what ways have you used video to best effect?
Yuriy Timen:
Yeah, great question. Definitely, video has been a strong meaningful user acquisition driver for us. Earlier, we measure a video’s performance not to sort of get too much into the weeds is we looked at lifts in brand awareness and specifically brand searches that video drives. As you know, video is not really something that you can measure the same way you measure let’s say deep search. You’re not going to get a lot of conversions on the immediate click-through basis, but when you advertise at the scale that we advertise at, you can clearly see the impact that it has on brand searches which later also converts into a lot of direct visits.
So, video as an acquisition driver by all means that’s been probably the biggest investment that we’ve made so far. We’ve also done video on the content side, which essentially just goes to our principle of creating valuable high quality content. So, if we feel that we’re working on a piece of content where video can really help deliver the core message more effectively, we’ll produce a video to go along with it. Another area we’re probably going to be investing in a little bit more over the coming months is video as an employer branding tool. We’ve done some videos to drive employer brand, but I think you’re going to see a lot more happening there.
Then also, just more diversification of video assets especially as Facebook, and Instagram, and Snapchat continue to come up with new motion picture formats. We’re constantly trying to stay on top of it and test into those formats.
Matt Byrom:
Have you used video in advertising, so pre-roll on YouTube, or on Facebook, and Instagram on as paid?
Yuriy Timen:
Yeah, we have.
Matt Byrom:
Excellent. Has that been successful for you as well?
Yuriy Timen:
Largely, yes. I mean not every video formats, like YouTube, yes. YouTube is definitely a powerhouse of a channel for us. Some of the other ones where we see good early results, but we’re still tinkering with it.
Matt Byrom:
It takes time to get right, I suppose?
Yuriy Timen:
Yup.
Matt Byrom:
It sounds like you guys are like almost an experimentation team, particularly the earlier things that you said about using the Google beta features and things. It sounds like you’re set up for experimentations. What are you using to or what’s the process that you have for tracking the experiments to success measuring? How do you actually structure that?
Yuriy Timen:
Yes, that’s correct, and we are a very experiment-friendly team and culture if you will. I think it starts before even get into a process, it starts with the kind of an underlying philosophy. So, we’re just a bunch of achievers, high performers. We don’t sit on our laurels and we understand that. It’s grow or die, and so how do you grow? I mean, whenever you have a successful outcome, yes that’s great and you can pat yourself on the back, but what that means is you’ve just increased your baseline. Now, it’s not much harder to grow at an impressive rate over that new baseline. That always creates a sense of urgency for us to keep experimenting.
So, we always carve out time into our quarterly planning. When we allocate bandwidth more generally, we always carve time to test into new things. It’s just part of-
More generally, we always carve time to test them to new things. It’s just part of our culture. It’s something that everybody’s thinking of. The things that we figure out how to do, we look for ways to scale them in an automated way as much as possible so we can be spending our mind share, and our intellectual horsepower out looking and testing into new things.
That’s on the philosophy front. Process wise, we’ve invested a lot into our experiment framework, we invested a lot into ideation. So, the entire lifecycle of experiments, how do you create strong hypotheses? How do you ideate against those hypotheses? How do you make sure that the best ideas win? How do you prioritize experiments based on some variation of the ice framework where you look at impact, certainty and level of effort? And how do we create cross functional teams that can really support our experiment initiatives?
So, there’s a lot of process but before you get into process, it’s got to be driven by a very foundational philosophical principles.
Matt Byrom:
You mentioned people will just jump on channels or beta features and try things. Do you have people or just try and test and then actually bring it back to the framework after you’ve seen some moderate success in an area, or you actually plan things out strategically, and then go after a channel?
Yuriy Timen:
I think it varies. But if I have to pick one, I think it’s probably the way our team is coached and the way our team is conditioned to think, is whenever you look at an opportunity to test something new, whether explicitly or intuitively, all of us look at it on an expected value basis, right? Just because something new and shiny was dangled in front of you, doesn’t mean you jump on it right away. Because our time is finite, and everything that we do has an opportunity cost associated with it.
So, I would like to believe that if someone is testing something, it is because they believe either they went through a rigorous prioritization framework, or maybe they just already have the pattern recognition to say this is worth doing right now on an expected value basis. Because maybe the level of effort is really low or … Typically, people will jump on things without maybe formally prioritizing them if the level of effort is really low, because then it’s of easier to make that intuitive case that like, “Oh, this is worth doing right now.” It’s going to be an easy win.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, that makes sense. I guess then lastly, I’d like to just bring it back to my final point to talk about before we move on to our last five, which is display, you talk about display and search in the past being two of the biggest drivers supporting the growth of the business. I was just quite interested to find out about the display side of things because display is often something that people associate with low click through rates, it can be difficult to actually convert people and people have this banner blindness and things. Talk to me about your experiences in that area and how you feel it’s been such a strong channel for Grammarly?
Yuriy Timen:
Yeah, great question. In the early days, we were basically measuring display performance the same way we measure search performance. So, on a very conservative click through basis, ignoring view through conversions. We were fairly rigorous in our performance measurement. We had success there just because we created really good creatives. Were very precise with our targeting. We tested very rigorously, and so we saw a lot of success.
But over time, we’ve noticed just a lot of inventory in display being bought up by what I would call nonperformance advertisers, more like brand advertisers like the Targets and the Best Buys and like the Volkswagens of the world. At that point, we have evolved as well. We started not just rely on the Google Display Network but also strike direct media partnerships with the big publishers that we thought were relevant to us. Maybe they were student focused websites, or like reference or, writing focused websites where we knew we had a really strong conversion rates because we saw it from the Google Display Network that we were placed on those sites.
We we’re able to go to them and strike direct deals with them, essentially cutting out Google as the middleman. Okay, I hope they’re not listening. Because Google was taking I think 30% or something like that of the click through, or rather the cost basis. So, we we’re able to save money and have a direct partnership and the publisher was able to make more.
Matt Byrom:
Okay.
Yuriy Timen:
And then, I think the way we were able to maintain display success over time is as the product evolved and the complexity of our ad ecosystem evolved, it made sense for us to start looking at things on a multi touch attribution basis. That actually expanded how we looked at display and the role that it played in user acquisition. So, it’s no longer just last touch, click through basis, but we’re now measuring display on a multi touch, more like a parabolic attribution model.
Matt Byrom:
That is very very interesting. So, buying smart is a big part of it but then actually expanding out to multi touch and across devices as well. Is that still a strong channel for you guys?
Yuriy Timen:
Yes, display is still meaningful.
Matt Byrom:
I guess to bring this to a final question here, what are you going to be focusing on for the rest of 2018 and into 2019, what’s important for the Grammarly team and your team specifically as the marketing team?
Yuriy Timen:
It’s continuing to optimize, scale and automate to the extent that it’s possible our bread and butter channels. Because we have some of the brightest people in growth working at Grammarly. We want them to be focusing on solving new problems as much as possible. So, there is always going to be that focus on how to take old problems or problems that we’ve already solved, and make sure that they occupy as little of our time as possible in maintaining.
So, there’s always a focus on that. That happens through hiring, happens through automating, it happens through outsourcing, et cetera. There are also a couple of other big channels. I won’t speak to them specifically, but there are a couple of channels that I know can be massively successful for us but we just haven’t cracked that nut yet. There’s going to be focused on cracking those.
There is going to be a big emphasis on just up leveling our creatives in general. Where I feel like we could use a fresher take on something. You may see a pretty big creative refresh happen over the coming months, and through 2018, mobile is still relatively new for us. We’ve only had a mobile keyboard for a year. So, there are still massive massive acquisition opportunities in mobile, which will come from taking our existing channels and expanding them into mobile, which we’re already doing. But also focusing on mobile unique and mobile specific acquisition opportunities.
Then the last thing I’ll say is again Grammarly business. That is a product that has different unit economics, different value proposition. So, it’s something that we’re really salivating over because it’s almost like starting a new company or having a new product to market. We’re really excited about doubling down their acquisition there.
Matt Byrom:
Well, it certainly sounds like you got a busy time ahead of you for sure. I know you mentioned you’re hiring at present as well. So, it certainly sounds like there’s going to be lots of new roles required for all the other work that you guys have got ahead of you.
Yuriy Timen:
Yeah, absolutely. We are a rapidly growing but still a very lean team. We’re about 160 people across three offices; Kyiv, San Francisco and New York. My team, the growth and marketing team is predominantly based here in San Francisco. We’re 16 people right now. We have a number of openings that you can check out a grammarly.com/jobs, and many more coming. And even if you don’t see a role that may be suitable for you, I’d say, reach out to us anyways. We’re always looking to connect with incredible individuals and oftentimes we’ll craft roles around the right people.
But I say the word lean team because it’s a badge of honor given Grammarly’s scale, we can easily be like a 700, 800 person company. But we’re not. The fact that we keep it lean provides a lot more learning opportunities and growth opportunities for the existing team, and that’s how we’re able to keep exceptional people here for so long.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. I’d love to take this to our last five questions, which is five quick-fire questions. The first one is, what’s your best piece of marketing advice?
Yuriy Timen:
I would say don’t sit or don’t rest on your laurels. It’s such a rapidly evolving space that, you have to innovate or you’re going to cease to be relevant. I like to use the analogy, and some people have heard me use it before of oil wells. Think about your existing marketing channels as existing oil wells that you’re drilling to sustain your community, if you will. But the problem is that you don’t know how deep those oil wells are. It’s very easy to just fall into complacency and keep drilling these oil wells, but before you know it, you’re going to hit rock bottom, quite literally.
That’s why it’s important to split your time and diversify your time between drilling existing oil wells and looking for new oil wells. So, looking for new channels, testing into new channels is analogous to essentially drilling for new oil wells. So, that would be my biggest piece of advice.
Matt Byrom:
I love that. Secondly, can you recommend a book to our listeners?
Yuriy Timen:
More recently, I’ve been reading books that are not directly connected to growth and even business. There are two that come to mind; World Order by Henry Kissinger, which talks about history of the world and society and the role that superpowers and decision making has played in world order. There are a lot of parallels there that you can bring into the business world. If you think about your company as being essentially a sovereign nation, and there are a lot of parallels there that can inform your decision making.
Another one is Extreme Ownership, which is written by former Navy SEAL, forgot his name. But that’s, again, about leadership and how there are parallels between the military world and the business world. So, a lot of good takeaways there as well.
Matt Byrom:
That was awesome. Thanks very much. I put links to those on Matt Byrom website. So, if anybody goes to mattbyrom.com, and then clicks on this podcast, there will be some links there to those books as well.
Number three is, what software tool could you not live without?
Yuriy Timen:
I would say Asana. I rely on the productivity management tools quite a bit. Asana is definitely something that helps me both in my professional and personal life, in terms of staying on top of things, being accountable, being reliable.
Matt Byrom:
Awesome. What’s your favorite example of a marketing campaign?
Yuriy Timen:
I was thinking about that Matt because you floated that by me. There is nothing that comes to mind, and I didn’t want to force anything. I think the main reason is that it’s not something that I pay attention too much. I don’t really think about marketing or growth successes as being driven by campaigns. I think it’s driven more by sustainable strategies and rapid innovation. To be honest, there’s no campaign that really comes to mind just because it’s deep in my mind works when it comes to looking at growth successes.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, that’s cool as well. It’s just that it’s nice to get insight from people in terms of their thoughts. So, it doesn’t always need to result in something specific. So, appreciate the insight there. My final question is, what other podcasts do you listen to?
Yuriy Timen:
That’s another one that I … I’m actually not very big on podcasts to be honest. No disrespect. Most of my information, I still consume through text as funny as it is. I read a ton. Even all of my books today are physical paper printed books. I don’t even do E-readers, which is an odd thing nowadays.
Matt Byrom:
I’m similar with my books I don’t have a an E-reader myself. I prefer the whole real paper method.
Yuriy Timen:
Exactly, yep.
Matt Byrom:
Well Yuriy, its been an absolute pleasure talking to you today. I think you’ve given a ton of takeaways for the listeners. If anybody hasn’t checked out Grammarly. I can’t believe you haven’t, but you should go and check it out. There’s obviously a free version, and then there’s a paid version that has a ton more features. We will be looking out for Grammarly for business in the future, and I wish you all the best. Thanks very much for your time today.
Yuriy Timen:
Yeah My pleasure. This was really fun. Thanks for having me.
Matt Byrom:
Thank you all for listening today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and share with your friends. Also, I would be extremely grateful if you could rate and review us on iTunes, or the channel you get this podcast through. Until next time, I’ve been your host, Matt Byrom.