Brand Marketing, Product-Market Fit, & App Growth — Gessica Bicego, Paired

0:00[Music] [Applause] hey you're listening to the sub club podcast a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing subscription app businesses we'll share insider secrets from the top subscription apps on the app stores let's get into the show hello i'm your host david barnard and with me today revenue cat ceo jacob ida our guest today is jessica bichiko chief marketing officer at paired the number one app for couples prior to joining parrot jessica spent six years leading performance marketing and growth at blinkist on the podcast we talked with jessica about how to approach brand marketing for apps finding product channel messaging fit and why you shouldn't even refer to bill

0:47gates in an ad campaign hi jessica thanks so much for being on the podcast really looking forward to talking to you today thank you so much for having me i'm super excited to be here i'm a huge fan of this podcast and so are the co-founders appeared uh so yeah hi kevin hi diego um yeah thank you for having me yeah speaking of paradise i was i i've actually had you on the list to invite as a guest since you were at blinkist but in the meantime you actually joined paired so tell me a bit about peridot and what was so exciting about joining the team there of course and i hope

1:20you're ready for a cheesy story because yeah always easy one and so yeah i mean um what paired is is a fun app for couple designed to bring you closer together so that's the beach let me tell you more um we all know that you know the romantic relationship that we have with our partner is one of the most important one but still i'm pretty sure especially after a lot of years a lot of kids there's not much time that goes into like taking care of their relationship and that's exactly what bayer does so every day you have questions quizzes games to really like you know connect

1:53with your partner and have like a healthier and happier relationship and um so why i decided to join it was i was in maternity leave um actually it was even before you know it was during my maternity leave i had a call with kevin uh one of the co-founder and because he just wanted to get some advice and i gave him some advice and then i checked out the app i really loved it um i use it with my husband and he really really helped us a lot then i had my baby didn't think about anything else and then back in october i thought like okay i need to go back to

2:24my maternity leave and i was really ready to take on a new challenge so that's why i started to look around you know see what the opportunities are but nothing really felt right like i don't know i just couldn't really find something that i really care about and i need to believe in the product to join a company and i also wanted to lead the entire marketing department and then i was talking with my husband i was like something doesn't feel right you know if it was something like paired and literally one day after kevin texted me and said that they were looking for a cmo if i knew somebody and i was like

2:59that's me sliding into your dms exactly so that worked uh and that's how i started to work there and i think why i joined well as i mentioned i was really ready to take a step up and start leading the entire marketing department before i was taking care of performance marketing growth uh that is like one part of you know the game but i really wanted to have the the full overview another thing is that i just love early stage startups that's my passion and you know i think it's nice to work in an established business that is like 8 10 years old but it's so much fun to be

3:36there at the beginning you're 20 people you have an idea boom like you realize that right away it's so much different and i don't know it just felt right there's a lot of there we are 24 people at the moment we were 15 when i joined so really really small team we are agile we are fast we are all professional there's also i think something that they did right is that they invested a lot in like having senior people at the beginning and i think this is such a great move because yes you spend a bit of money you know on hiring you know good people but then everyone knows what

4:08they're doing um everyone is super independent just field amazing and also the product i mean it's about love and everyone loves love and you know i think in the first month i received um an email from uh from my customers and i literally started to cry she was like i've been with my husband for 15 years i use her app and i feel more connected than ever and she mentioned all these little things that she loved about her husband that she forgot about just made my day so yeah i'm really proud yeah that's really cool working on something that you're so passionate about makes uh makes doing boring

4:46computer stuff all day a little bit easier right exactly exactly and i mean to be honest also what i love about this is um similar to blink is if you want when i joined blinkist it was seven years ago no one knew about it i remember telling people yeah i worked for blink and people like uh what what is it um but then right now it's a well-established brand everyone knows it and especially at the beginning people were like oh why should i pay for like a five minutes 15 minutes version of books and people now are like yes i get it and i think it's really similar for like you

5:18know the relationship um side right now people are like why do i have to pay for something like that why do i need to care even so i think it's really exciting to be the first um up the first brand in this vertical and to make it famous and successful and more competitors will come but you know we're ready for that yeah that's amazing so one of the things that that i know you've been thinking a lot about at paired is brand marketing and how different your approach to that is from your blinkist days of doing a lot heavier kind of performance marketing user acquisition so i'm curious why

5:57as part of pair do you think brand marketing is going to be so key to the long-term success of the company of course um so let's start from the fact that i am more of a tech performance person that's where my expertise are i started computer science and then i started marketing so you know performance marketing is my sweet spot i love it and that's what i did in my previous jobs at kaya and at blinkist i was the first person joining the team i mean that's one of the things that i think blinkist is really known for doing well like their performance marketing engine is is that's why

6:31everybody knows blinkist is frame because it's everywhere exactly exactly and i mean it's working right it's amazing um at the same side i feel i think that especially once you start having maybe an audience that is a bit broader i think blinkist is still targeting a little bit of a niche if you think about it while for example paired i mean it's targeting everyone that is in a relationship um i think you know having a strong brand is so important and for example think about the dating apps like there's so many datings up out there but tinder is still the best one and it's because they they build like a super strong

7:05brand it's even like it's a it's like a common term even if i never use a dating app but it's still so well known so it makes such a difference also performance marketing i mean we all know um it can become addictive there's only so much that you can grow and also i think it's also easy to replicate like i see now that especially in the educational vertical there's so many new competitors coming up it's so hard to keep up and you know maybe you were the first one doing these campaigns but these people come in with like a small team they copy what you've done and boom

7:38they kind of steal everything um at the same time also i think that when you're talking about love there's so much emotions you know about that that i feel that just focusing on performance marketing and what works it would be just one side of it um so that's why they decided to take a completely different approach and start from day zero building a strong brand they will be recognized they will be remembered and they will make actually our paid acquisition a little bit easier more sustainable more long term so the first thing i did is to hire someone that knows about brand because as i mentioned i'm the performance girl

8:15um but i i'm really excited about you know working more on this and i've been kind of like taking care of this like transition um working with brand awareness to defining brand our brand book but next week we have a new director brian johnny and i'm so excited about that so we'll see we'll see how it goes where where does a rubber meet the road for an app and actually thinking about brand marketing you know are you thinking about it as kind of a percentage of spend allocation are you thinking about it in terms of you know making sure that all the ads kind of contribute to that brand you know

8:51because one of the things in the industry is that ugly ads perform super well but might not actually be good for your brand so so do you see it as kind of like this all-encompassing thing but then also something that you're directly gonna put money into yeah i think i see on both sides so for me brand is everything every time that you have a touch point with you know a user or potential user or your customer that that's where brand leaves so it needs to be to transpire in every single ads message thing that you put out there um so for example having like a strong

9:24you know prank island using them for your ads and so on but at the same time i also think that if you just do that that's not enough to build a strong brand you need to put budget behind and there are some platforms channels that are better at brand awareness than others um i'm thinking for example about you know paid content um auburn and taboola that's a platform where i spent a lot of time on it's a performance channel and everyone uses the performance channel but especially in some markets where the competition is not so high since you pay for cpc you have so many impression that

9:58it actually becomes stronger than tv so you know you can still do a lot of awareness campaigns without spending millions on tv because usually you know small startups they don't have that budget to spend and tv is like a long term game so i think yes allocating budget but depending on the stage where you are the company you're working for the startup the product and so on so in my case i would actually be targeting this on both sides and at the end of the day what i'm willing what i want to see in terms of results that's the hard part how do you measure that

10:31have yeah it's the question that everyone asked um i wanna have a healthy shares between paid and organic that's at the end what i wanna see and i also wanna see the overall my paid acquisition cost instead of becoming like higher and higher they maybe stay at the same level or they even go down because you know the more you spend if you spend a million if you've spent four million you can expect your conversion rate to go down what if by doing more awareness campaign i'm able to actually maintain that conversion rate even when i spend more on performance marketing and at the same time i have a lot of organics coming in

11:04that is the dream um how to do it yeah that's hard we need to do a follow-up podcast in a year and talk through all the all the the failures and successes brand takes years that's the thing with brands right like it's not something you can like i blinkist i would say is an established brand but that took years of performance marketing and i would say they have a really you you know blink is spran when you think of it right it's clean it's professional like it's associated with learning there's like some very clean associations i see pairs very obvious place where that i think you can

11:39build a very different association obviously but like a very similar kind of you know associating the emotions and and the feeling for the brand exactly yeah as i said it's really hard to know when you have it one question i want to ask about and obviously you have a new brand director coming in who will help and stuff like this but how in terms of like how do you envision setting the brand because it is so there's obviously like tactical important things like like you said it has to probably play to love right it has to be approachable probably a warmer brand than would be something

12:14else i'm just imagining here but like how do you imagine as a marketer involving founders involving employees like how do you how do you envision defining a brand at this stage because you're fairly early like uh paired's been around for how long um i mean one year and a half so we are pretty new you know and also like you know the the product changed so much in the past one year and a half so i opened it back when i was praying and then i opened when my daughter was three months old and it was like oh my god that's a completely different app and that's that's what

12:46happened when you are like an early stage startup so i think right now we're still in the exploration phase i think that the product is exactly what we wanted it to be um we know that you know what we have works and now it's just a matter of like better defining the brand how we're gonna do it so well the first thing i did is i organized um like a session a brainstorming session with all the founders and the people that have been there from the beginning and what i what i did is just i was using miro and i looked for a template brand this sounds good let me use this one

13:17you're giving away all your secrets yeah exactly and i just learned like a super general learning session about that it was so good for me to just get you know the baseline but that's also where i define okay i need someone to come in and be involved we are really lucky that right now we're 24 people so it's not a lot like even if we were to involve everyone to be honest it like is not so bad and also i think that people knows what they are responsible for and what they can give input but it's someone else that will have to decide that's what i love

13:47about you know payer that is really really fast so how i want to set it up is that i want the brand person to have a specific budget because i feel that without a budget a brand person you know they're lost what do they do um but also i want to for them not to have too many stakeholders involved so i'm gonna be the founders myself some other key people that have been there since the beginning and to be honest the one that will drive the strategy is the customer so i i saw the recently you had a super interesting um episode and i don't know i really really loved it

14:23because you were talking with i think sean um regarding the important yeah exactly regarding the importance of listening to your customers and like how to feed uh customers input to the decision that you make in terms of product the same you're gonna do in terms of brand so yeah i'm really excited to see where this is gonna take us yeah and speaking of understanding your customers um i think it's one kind of undervalued aspect of finding marketing channel fit for your product and it's something i know you've talked about before and i wanted to dive into you know everybody kind of defaults to to facebook or google ads um but now you

15:06know there's tick tock there's there's like a million different channels um how do you think about fitting kind of both your brand but also finding the right marketing channel for the right product mm-hmm absolutely yeah it's a really good question i mean to be honest i joined there just in in january and you know there's there was a tremendous tremendous growth like compared to the year before right now i think we grew like 30 x and we're now like at 800 000 monthly active users so the growth was insane and you probably are wondering how did we do it um it's actually through mainly facebook at the beginning so facebook is

15:46still the the go-to channel but um i did actually a presentation long time ago five years ago um on the importance of really diversifying your uh your channel's acquisition and even more when you want to have performance channel and uh maybe awareness channel or maybe to build this like funnel where you have like awareness and then you go with like clearly performance things so usually what i look like i look at the product i look at the market fit i look at the customers um feedback and definitely look at the potential scalability difficulty resources needed for that channel so there's a lot of things that goes into like considering so for

16:22example i would say that something like facebook is really easy to start you just need one person maybe some people to do the um the creatives and then you can start well if you want to do tv not only you have to spend a lot of money you know on like media buying but you need to have a strong tv spot and that is going to cost you minimum 150k so that's usually how i look you know at the next channel that i'm gonna then i'm gonna explore i tend to have like the pillars the channels that are working where i continue investing like let's say massively um in this channel

16:55usually 30 will go to like just testing new things and in the meantime i will expand my budget like starting to explore new channels knowing that for some of them it's going to take longer so um when i was at blinkist uh one of the things that i was really proud of is establishing paid content as one of the main driver um so albin and taboola that took me and my team i think nine months it's a long time it's like nine months of suffering and really bad performance and people saying like are you sure you know what you're doing um but you know it eventually paid off um now i think

17:29blinkist is one of the main spenders when it comes to paid content so yeah there's a lot of things to take in consideration and uh definitely like listening to customers number one but also look at the resources that you have in house look at what you need to make successful look at how much time you have um you know if you especially if you're working with like um investors and you need to bring numbers like what do you need to bring back do you need to bring back ambitious and really like high growth that's one thing that you can just explore different platforms and so on do

18:00you need to focus on profitability because i mean we've all seen what's happening right now there's a lot of people being laying off just so the other day like an email from the uber ceo and we see in general they're like really turning from like extreme growth to like are you profitable how long is how long is it gonna take suddenly like uh ltv balance later sound is not such a great strategy right exactly exactly um and so i think that really matters also like you know what do you want to achieve and how much time do you have yeah and then in kind of the

18:32next level deeper from from product channel fit um and i think you've talked about this before that blinkist you just never were able to to scale up on tick tock you know some people are like really successful on tick tock it just like wasn't a good kind of product channel fit for blinkist but even within you know facebook app versus instagram versus other ads versus other channels how do you think about fitting the messaging and the ads themselves to the channel and like what works and what doesn't on an ad basis versus even a channel basis yeah that to be honest like it changes for every platform like it changes even from

19:13your own platform so you know the message that you put on your website on your app is like much different from the one that you would put in an ads for example what we see like an example of what we've seen is that we we do con like we do a lot of like um user testing and research with our customers to see what they love what are the section that they love and what is interesting is that this section or like the the topics that they like in the app they're not the one that brought them in you know um so that's really interesting to see how

19:43different it is like it's like i'm driven to a certain product in an app because i think that i'm interested in this but then i end up using it for something else but if i use that message in the ads it doesn't actually work you know so you really need to like have a super broad approach and consider okay who are you talking to um which channels are you how much time do you have to sell your product because if it's a facebook ad with you know just a static image there's not a lot of time if it's an influencer ad you can tell like a

20:14long story you can be funny um you can actually show the use case of every day so i think it really has to to change and then i mean it's pretty clear that there's a generational gap between different platforms like if i look about tick tock versus like facebook you know um i mean my mom is on facebook i am on instagram my i don't know my nephew isn't tick tock well but i imagine for for your target demo age cohort's pretty important like probably most people yeah on the in the tick tock set might not have decade-long relationships they're trying to sustain and maintain right

20:53exactly exactly although i mean the the fact that we are about like having fun especially in the relationship you know we are targeting actually a kind of a broad amount of people that can be together for a year two years or like 10 years is really really broad and that makes it makes it nice but also like there's no way that we can use one message to rule them all and get them all interesting in the app we really need to go deeper and understand what are the motivation and i mean with influencer marketing for example is easier because you know the the audience um you know more or less how old they

21:27are what they're interested in in other platform like facebook where you go with like a broad targeting uh you need to go with what sells so yeah um another thing i wanted to ask you about was how you power all of that with data so we're talking about you know doing the user research looking at yeah and and you're kind of in a unique position right now having just joined um uh paired and i imagine there wasn't a ton of infrastructure before you got there and then with your computer science background so how have you been thinking about building out a data platform to understand like you talked

22:03about a few minutes ago um how you know messaging toward one feature actually brings them in but then they're going to get hooked on another feature how do you know that and then how do you how do you measure that how do you perform against that and how do you build out a data pipeline to to continually measure those sorts of things of course that's my favorite topic um again i think one thing blinkist did really well like from my understanding of the company is that that was you think it's a it's a small audiobook company and yes it is but also like it's really a performance marketing machine

22:38that they figured out right yeah and that's true for a lot of companies that do well in what we do right um for for better or worse uh a lot of the bigger ones it's they've figured out a product but then the second part is figuring out that that channel unlocks so sorry please absolutely and i think it's also so interesting to see okay because when i joined um blinkist it was like i say around seven years ago and we were also like 30 people so their their data infrastructure was yeah there was no data infrastructure you know we were at the beginning we were still using a

23:06lot of spreadsheet but i think since the beginning there was a strong willingness to build everything in-house while you know seven years later i'm john impaired and i see that the approach is completely different and a lot of time is like you know why would we build something in-house when there's a service like revenue card for example and they could do that for you you know um i think it's completely different so i found myself building a completely different type of right data infrastructure and i did it twice so that's that's really exciting to see the differences um for me having data it's super important right now you we since

23:45we are using a lot of tools like external tools the risk is that all this knowledge is distributed across like three or four different platforms but then there's no way to to bring them together and i think to be honest that's the issue that i'm facing right now so we are working we have a project we made a already like a lot of improvements on like bringing everything in-house and then understanding okay what is that we need because when i joined we're still using um you know google spreadsheet that's how you start but yeah that's the difference that i see i think before it was more like build everything in house

24:17do everything manually have a team that will like take care of maintaining api access and so on and so forth and right now it's more like okay distribute use a lot of tools but then also bring back in-house and have a strong visualization tool that will allow us to go deeper on the funnel from like the moment that they see the ad once to you know downloading and then using the app and doing analysis on the behavior so that's usually you know i follow the entire funnel for that um yeah it's pretty pretty exciting so what what's the current stack for uh paired i know y'all use revenue cad do

24:50you use amplitude do you use an mmp like what what's the stack currently and and where how do you see that evolving as you grow listen then i want the money from all these you know tools that i'm using because if i have to mention them no no i'm joking i'm joking um i so at the moment we're using mmp that is adjust uh we are using um of course effigy cat we are also using amplitude right now we're looking for a tool to download um or marketing data there are a couple of options um out there i think five trend is probably the the most

25:24common one but we're still trying to define bringing all the data in them you know in-house and snowflake and then visualization visualizing the data through um locker so this is the setup that we have right now uh in the past i've been using um i don't know how to pronounce it c sense or sisense um it was periscope data before um but it was also really strong in terms of visualization but i found the locker is like next step it's it's interesting this um you talk about the and i i actually was introduced to toby one of the founders of blinkist years ago um as he he found

26:03us organically this would have maybe been 2020 before we had razer series and all this stuff and he had he was like oh my god like we have solved this internally this is such a nightmare you know he told the story of your journey internally yeah having to build all this stuff in-house and yeah here we are five years later for for blankets maybe longer like okay yeah now you can't have tools but this like last step still exists of okay i have like these vendors for you know my behavioral data my acquisition data and my my subscription data and we still have to merge them

26:36right and you know from what i've heard this is a very it's a very common pattern it's what we do internally right we we use lots of different vendors for our for our analytics and then we pull it all together in a data warehouse for customization um and things like that but that's a much better game because like by the time it gets to snowflake you're just writing sql queries and gluing stuff together you're not like you're not like especially when you involve something like train i think is a great tool as well for just handling some of the like data schlepping and things like this um but uh i wonder if that will

27:07further become compressed at some point we'll have this podcast again in five years and see if like there's a meta super platform and maybe it's revenue cat i don't know um we'll see yeah i love to do that and i think also right now as a matter of like there's so many also competitors coming up from all these like different parts you know that you need to to bring together so it's really really hard to make even a decision like looking about you know the marketing api for example oh my god there's so much out there but then when you go deeper you see that the main

27:35players are like always up to date to the changes on api uh they're more reliable they have a stronger customer support they also cost double but you know wait uh so this is this is my naivete can can you tell me what a marketing api is like oh so connecting uh so for example sorry connecting to um facebook to download um data so or to our brain to download data oh so you don't have to connect to each like platform exactly i call it marketing api but maybe it has like a different name so yeah yeah i mean it makes sense it's aggregating these like especially i mean similar

28:09level to what we do right which is aggregate disparate data sources and try to normalize it right exactly exactly and um i think also regarding data there's something interesting about automation that i think it's also changing a little bit like if i look at my experience before i remember you know spending a lot of time with my with the team building automation rules for example for for our brain and right now all the things that you know we developed that are actually within the platform so you don't need to do anything it's already done and i think we are moving more and more in that direction um right now i don't know if

28:45it makes sense to use like you know an automation tool even for facebook ads the only things where you need help is actually the uploading of creatives that is like a nightmare but still you know everything else is kind of done with a script and that's it or it's already like um developed within the interface that you're using being that the facebook business manager or whatever so it's really interesting to see how the marketing platforms are evolving and yeah that's that's good for us ah you learn learn something new every day so we i haven't talked as much in depth with somebody at that at that level of

29:20building out your own data warehouse and visualizing a snowflake and uh yeah there's a lot to it and um it's cool that you kind of brought a lot of that experience from paired to such an early stage uh i mean sorry from blinkist having spent so many years building all of it out and then like he said uh pear is very very smart to hire somebody like you early and bring all of that knowledge and experience to build it out internally this is why the game gets harder and harder too because like yeah pioneers like blinkist figure it out and then those people go and now that that

29:54becomes the bar right uh to compete in the in the for the next generation of apps right um but we also have like you were saying like the automation getting pushed down to the platforms that's a field leveler right because now more apps have access to that it's baked into the platforms um and things like that so uh but and and then the end result ideally is better targeting matching and better apps because you're spending less company resources bill spinning up internal data you know you'll do a lot of work to get the looker snowflake setup going but then it will that's not a huge huge lift um and

30:27you'll be able to like spend more time like hey like going back to the stuff we talked to the beginning of the call which is brand you know like yeah awareness like the things that you actually get into marketing to do right actually switches reach people and and spread the word about a you know a good service exactly i think that's the risk of like going too much into the data side that sometimes you have access to so much data that you can get lost i remember spending hours and hours looking at like going deeper and deeper and deeper until at some point you lose significance and

30:56so the data you're looking at means literally nothing um so i think it's always good to have a good balance between like going into details but also think about overall business um and you know what you're what you want to achieve yeah i know the two of you could um uh nerd out on this for another third topic where i like uniquely yeah but i we are getting short on time and there's something i really wanted to talk to you about so you and uh andy from feature the co-founder of feature uh do a podcast mobile growth nightmares and i freaking love this podcast i'm a

31:31huge fan and one of the things i love and i talk about it on this podcast quite a bit probably to a fault but it really is just so true that you learn as much from fuck-ups as you'll call it on the mobile growth nightmares as you do from the successes but most people only want to talk about the successes so it's it's amazing that you have a whole podcast dedicated to to screwing up and learning from it and then talking you know being honest about having screwed up and some of them are like hey we we wasted 200 000 because of a bug or you know some

32:04misconfiguration or whatever and that's a big thing to both own but then also to realize hey that's that's a learning experience and it's just it happens like when you're spending that much money you're gonna screw up and waste some of it so anyways um uh that kind of quick overview and plug for your podcast there but uh i did want to talk through some of your favorite and some of the more interesting screw-ups from from the podcast so one of the ones i thought was especially interesting was at clement and his cease and desist can you give us a quick story on that oh my god yes i mean also it's i

32:39kind of like it happened to me as well somehow because we were working together so clemont he was like the um head of paid social at blinkist and so he was in my team um and we were taking care of you know paid acquisition and at some point we found an amazing article plus ads that work it was like something about bill gates and you know and the reading list of bill goods it was insane oh my god it worked so perfectly and we were like clapping each other yeah good job we found the one and then i think after maybe a couple of weeks or maybe no maybe a month i don't

33:12remember uh yeah we received uh not from bill gates but from someone pretty close to him uh they say like uh you need to just bring it down and stop running and that was like such a nightmare because at that moment since it was working so well you know all these ads were pointing like we were using this creative and so as soon as we moved the ad the account went from spending i don't know 100 to spending 10 and so of course there were not enough events yeah it was a disaster like the entire channel fell down and also the same creator was used across multiple channel

33:44so we had to take this you know um everywhere so that was like that was a disaster so don't use famous names or if you use it maybe not too much not too much yeah i was gonna say actually be interesting to know what the uh what the actual case law on that would be right because it's not like you were saying bill gates endorses blinkist right you were just spreading news about a public figure right you might have been in the clear but as a small startup you can't afford to figure that out right you're just like wow let's try something else exactly looking at what is happening in

34:16the u.s with all the low suit i'm like i'm going to stay away from you that's also true like blinkist is a german company right so like uh where's your standing bill i don't know but yeah again like you're just like cease and desist okay like what am i gonna do yeah exactly but but and it seemed like another great lesson from that one too is to to not put too many eggs in one basket right it's like even if you have this one that's performing so well to continue to maintain diversity of ads and budget right yeah yeah absolutely i think um that's what i'm doing right now not only

34:48diversifying the channels but really diversify the messages as well i make sure that you have at least like four or five creatives that are working at the same time so if something happen you know you have like a back-up plan yeah all right and so then another good story and this is so this podcast hasn't come out yet so i haven't been able to listen to it uh but it will be out before um before we release our podcast the sub club podcast with you on it but there's a story with the runtastic app uh that's gonna be on the mobile growth nightmare so tell us about that one yeah it was

35:20like um so it was actually a live recording that we did at the asa conference in berlin two or three weeks ago yeah it was really nice just to see people you know in real life it was amazing and we invited um luca stefanutti that is leading growth at adidas runtastic and if you haven't heard of that is like is an app for for running it was pretty famous and it was just called runtastic but then it was acquired by adidas and he was telling these like super interesting stories about the fact that when it was acquired you know adidas adidas actually that is better adidas and it's such a big name

35:54so of course they wanted to change it right to change the name to represent that but then um what happened is that suddenly since it was like a really well-known platform they lost like so much when they changed the name they lost so much organic um organic discoverability like people were looking for that and they were not finding and at the same time there was such a big drop in conversion because all these people that were looking for adidas shoes on the app store i don't know why you would do that but they were doing that they will arrive download the app and then they would say like wait a

36:25moment where's the shoes that i wanted to buy so the conversion rate dropped as well this means that all the ads campaign and everything that was depending on the vents kind of you know uh went to boop and uh yeah it was like a super disaster and it took the month to really recover and it's something that probably you know they should have thought about it i think there were some discussion but they didn't imagine the impact to be so big so it's so interesting because you will feel like yeah of course i'm gonna use this used name in the app store makes a lot of

36:54sense but yeah you need to be careful to what you wish for gonna have a lot of installs but it kind of takes us all the way back around to our our first part of the conversation is that the adidas brand is about buying shoes and and the runtastic brand was about uh tracking your running and so when they switched the branding it switched the expectation of people coming into the app so yeah that's so interesting so hopefully hopefully the episodes will be out really soon let's see i'll i'll ask andy to work on that just after that nice well we are we are uh running out of

37:31time i wish we could talk to you for another hour because uh this has been amazing and there's so much more that that um that you've learned over the years that you could share so we'll have to have you back on some time but as we're wrapping up are you hiring at paired or what else you want to say as we wrap up yes so we are hiring a lot of people so please have a look at the website at www.player.com we're hiring like a bunch of new people we don't want to grow too much but we have some like key positions that we're looking for so please check it out

38:00and yeah in general like i'm really excited to see you know where this company is growing i believe 100 what we're doing um if you want to like you know just have a chat i'm always available for learning exchange you can find me on linkedin and you can see my podcast that comes out every six months because we're not as good as you guys yeah that's it all right thank you so much jessica for being on the podcast it's so fun talking to you thank you to make sure you never miss an episode subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player thanks so much for

38:31listening until next time [Music]