The Role of Product Marketing In An Early-Stage Social Startup

A Product Marketer’s take on the startup journey — from finding initial users to getting acquired by Twitter

I’m excited to share the news that Squad has been acquired by Twitter!

As the sole Product Marketer on the team I’ve spent the past year focused on honing the messaging and building out new channels for talking to current and potential users.

My entire career has been focused on Gen Z products and this is now the second acquisition I’ve been part of (I was also a Marketer at Musical.ly before and after it was acquired by Bytedance and became TikTok) — so I thought it’d be fun to share 3 lessons learned from marketing at early-stage startups.

1. Community Is Where It’s At

Whenever I talk to people about my work, they tend to immediately bring up the pandemic. Of course Covid-19 has heightened the need for shared experiences like co-watching videos, but I believed that live audio and video spaces were the future of social long before the rest of the world caught up to that idea. When I joined Squad in 2019 it was a small but growing community.

The need to connect with other people and the desire to find new form factors of communicating and sharing is a longstanding human problem — and is an issue that I feel particularly passionate about because of my life story.

As a kid and teenager, I was the opposite of sociable. I didn’t see myself in my class or classmates and I felt like I had nothing in common with them. Books interested me more than people, and so I spent most of my time reading. The magical world of Harry Potter seemed a lot more compelling than the real world — which is why I ended up creating a Harry Potter forum for Italians, like myself, to talk about the series. To my surprise and delight, in just 3 months I had over 2,000 people talking to each other about the books. I felt like these were my people. They existed in the real world — I just needed a way to find them and bring them together, and what I learned was that the internet made that possible.

That’s why, years later, I found my way into tech and startups. I just kept following that desire to build community and create new ways to bring people together.

My work at both TikTok and Squad focused on the people. What drew me in is still what lights me up and is where, I believe, the opportunity lies for consumer social entrepreneurs. The 3 jobs to be done in social are:

• Connecting people with similar interests (your IRL friends are unlikely to share all your niche curiosities!)
• Giving people more creative ways to express themselves and share those captured moments (whether playing games, creating content, or hanging out in virtual rooms)
• Making the virtual world and its experiences feel more like the real world

2. Authenticity Can’t Be Bought or Faked

It’s hard to build for a community that you don’t genuinely care about or feel connected to in some way because the only way to create something people want is if you spend a lot of time with them.

Early on we identified Gen Z as our core audience. They were the people organically using and sharing the app, which is what got me so excited to join because teenagers are my jam. I think there’s something special and fascinating about the teenage experience and see them as especially brilliant — there’s a hopefulness, struggle, and intensity that’s unique to humans who are 13–19 years old.

Even though I’m a Millennial I have a genuine affinity for the Gen Z vibe. I don’t think that’s something you can fake.

I was in charge of creating and launching a student ambassador program for Squad. We met with 10 students every week throughout the entire summer of 2020 and it was the best research because we focused on building real relationships with the teens.

Some simple advice for connecting with Gen Z:

• Work with them and talk to them as peers — teenagers hate feeling talked down to so respect their interests, life experiences and desires
• Don’t bore them with long questionnaires — find ways to have casual conversations and preferably observe their real behavior; most people can’t tell you what they want you to build — you’ll need to get good at reading between the lines based on what they do, rather than what they say

3. Learn Quickly From Many Mistakes

We’ve done a lot of testing to get where we are — it’s always been a top priority. The things we constantly looked for signal on included: new features, new ideas, and in my case, new marketing campaigns.

An area of particular interest was in understanding the importance of influencers — how to work with them, how to select them, and how to communicate effectively with them.

It hasn’t all been easy. We’ve made mistakes, and I’ve certainly made mistakes. But the truth is, the results have been so good that those mistakes don’t feel like failures. Fortunately, the entire team at Squad is made of people who understand that things don’t always work out, and there’s never any reason to blame someone when that happens.

We started rapidly iterating across social channels and quickly discovered that TikTok was our best bet for finding and engaging with microinfluencers.

Instagram was overcrowded. YouTubers turned around content too slowly. But TikTok offered a place where our core audience hung out and new influencers were constantly made — but where few brands were available.

In March, unbeknownst to us, a random TikToker in Canada posted a walkthrough video of Squad and it got put on the For You Page — which led to an absolute deluge of downloads. That sudden rush of downloads caused us to rise in the App Store rankings — and that happy accident became something we realized, with a bit of help, we could potentially replicate on purpose instead of on accident.

Every week we’d focus in on 1 or 2 experiments to test out. When we saw a positive signal we’d double-down on it for a few weeks to see if it had real legs or if it was a one-hit wonder (as marketing campaigns sometimes are!).

Many of our earliest tests were focused more on figuring out what messaging interested users — we’d try out messaging for features that weren’t really fully built yet just to get signal on the market response.

You can’t market a bad product. Pouring money into a leaky bucket is useless.

Being an early-stage marketer requires you to be focused on:

• Creating feedback loops to learn from users
• Building excitement — let your customers tell your story whenever possible
• Understanding & improving product retention
• Testing out potential growth channels (you can’t be afraid to try totally new and untested channels because that’s often where the best opportunities lie since marketers at big companies can be more cautious — use that to your team’s advantage!)

The Next Chapter

It’s a huge accomplishment for our entire team to have a successful exit, but like many things in life, it’s bittersweet because I’ve grown so fond of our users and close to the team.

I want to sincerely thank my mentor Laura Jones, the Global Head of Product Marketing and Customer Engagement at Uber, who was an advisor to Squad. She challenged me each week to “try something new” and made me think outside the box while still providing a structure to work with. Not all advisors to a startup actually jump in and make a difference, but she did.

I also want to thank our investors at First Round Capital — they had a program that brought me together with Matt Jayson, Product at Google Pay, who helped me understand the importance of constantly asking questions, and learning how to meaningfully influence the product direction.

Most of all, I’m so thankful to the team I’ve had the honor and pleasure of working with at Squad — and in particular, our Co-Founder Esther Crawford and Ethan Sutin — for always letting me be who I am and for giving me the space to try, fail, and succeed.

We’re off to a new adventure at Twitter where the team will continue working in the conversations space, and I’m excited by the opportunity of bringing what we’ve learned about live audio and video to a bigger stage!

I don’t think we just brought people together at Squad. Rather, we allowed people to experience together. At the end of the day, that’s what makes the challenge fun and rewarding to me. From the constant stream of messages we received, I hope and believe that the lives of countless shy teenagers were improved as a result of what we built together, with them and for them.